Perceptual Space (P-Space) and Language Space (L-Space)
June 05, 2025
Written by Aybars Asci
In the early stages of human development, our awareness of things or people outside ourselves is connected to the world that we can directly experience with our senses. Only the objects or people that are within this perspectival space exist, and when they disappear from that perspectival space, not only do they disappear from perception, but their entire existence seemingly vanishes. Early learning specialists correlate a baby getting upset and crying at a nursery during a parent drop-off with the understanding that for a baby, the disappearance of her parents from her sightline is associated with their loss from her life.
Avenues Shenzhen Campus, ELC
Consider this common occurrence: a baby sits in her highchair, and she throws an object, like her toy or spoon, on the floor. She starts crying when the object she just threw away disappeared from her sightline. An adult interferes with this situation and grabs the object from the floor, cleans it, and puts it back on her highchair. The baby smiles at first, and then throws the object back out again. In this scenario, the baby is not testing the parent’s patience, but rather, she is learning something important. She is learning that [this] object in front of her continues to exist even when she throws it on the floor, which is outside of her sightline. The reappearance of the object with the assistance of an adult reassures the baby that the object that she threw away is still there even when she can no longer see it. Piaget calls the realization that something continues to exist—even when it’s no longer sensed—“object permanence.”[1] Even though the baby cannot talk, she uses gestures of pointing, as she cognitively develops object permanence. Before the acquisition of language, she uses the deictic gestures of being [here] and seeing [this] object.
As children start to talk, how do they acquire deixis in language—pointing with words—when they have encountered it, thus far, only by pointing their fingers? Unlike categorical words like “spoon” or names like “Joe” that do not change depending on who speaks and where they speak from, the correct use of deictic terms is dependent on the speaker’s position and the proximity of the subject matter to the speaker.
In an essay on how a child acquires English expressions for space and time, psycholinguist Herbert H. Clark argues that the child acquires them “by learning how to apply these expressions to the a priori knowledge [that the child] has about space and time.”[2] This a priori knowledge comes from a space Clark calls “P-space,” the perceptual space the child is born into. He writes:
The child is born into a flat world with gravity, and he himself is endowed with eyes, ears, an upright posture, and other biological structure. These structures alone lead him to develop a perceptual space, a P-space, with very specific properties. Later on, the child must learn how to apply English spatial terms to this perceptual space, and so the structure of P-space determines in large part what he learns and how he quickly learns it. The notion is that the child cannot apply some term correctly if he does not already have the appropriate concept in his P-space.[3]
As a baby discovers the phenomena of gravity that forces the objects she throws toward the floor, into disappearance from her vision, she is developing a broader world than her innate P-space, where objects exist beyond her immediate vision (object permanence). The baby expresses herself using deictic expressions in absence of spoken language. As she acquires the language expressions that relate to the concepts of P-space, she enters what Clark calls “L-space,” the concept of space underlying English spatial terms. L-space coincides with P-space, as such that “any property found in L-space should also be found in P-space.”[4]
Clark summarizes the characteristics of the P-space of a person, in upright position—what he calls the canonical position—as “the optimal position to perceive other objects visually, auditorily, tactually, etc.”[5] And he defines these in geometric terms: “P-space consists of three reference planes and three associated directions: (1) ground level is a reference plane and upward is positive; (2) the vertical left-to-right plane through the body is another reference plane and forward from the body is positive; and (3) the vertical front-to-back plane is the third reference plane and leftward and rightward are both positive directions.”[6] (Figure 3.6)
3.6 P-Space. The diagram is created based on Herbert Clark’s definition
According to Clark, “the perceptual features in the child’s early cognitive development (his P-space) are reflected directly in the semantics of his language (his L-space).”[7] The critical role that the P-space plays in the development of the individual’s L-space is an important hinge in the interrelationship between deixis, architecture, and empathy. P-space is innate to the person’s experience; it is phenomenological; and it is directly relatable to the physical environment. Architects shape the P-space, and as such, they have an influence on the development of the L-space for both the individual and society. Therefore, in theory, if we can design the P-space purposefully, we can shift the semantics (meaning) and potentially create a place that catalyzes empathy. This is the premise of this chapter, and the design conjectures included later in the chapter illustrate how, with my design team, I have explored these relationships in our projects. But first, it is important to discuss the theoretical framework that acts as a bridge between psycholinguistics and architectural discourse.
Reference:
[1] Carol Garhart Mooney, Theories of Childhood: An Introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erikson, Piaget, and Vygotsky (Redleaf Press, 2013), 82.
[2] Herbert Clark, “Space, time, semantics and the child” in Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language, ed. T.E. Moore (Academic Press, 1973), 28.
[3] Clark, “Space, time, semantics and the child,” 28.
[4] Clark, “Space, time, semantics and the child,” 28.
[5] Clark, “Space, time, semantics and the child,” 34.
[6] Clark, “Space, time, semantics and the child,” 35.
[7]Clark, “Space, time, semantics and the child,” 30.