Staying oriented in wayfinding: a comparison of orientation information between english and mandarin speakers

Verbal descriptions are commonly used in daily lives for giving directions for wayfinding. They are valuable sources to understand underlying components that can contribute to spatial orientation, which is degrading with the growing use of routing services in navigation systems. Previous studies dec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGeoJournal Vol. 87; no. 1; pp. 75 - 85
Main Authors Li, Rui, Huang, Hongchun
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.02.2022
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Decision making
Descriptions
English language
Environmental Management
Geography
Human Geography
Hypotheses
Knowledge
Languages
Navigation
Navigation systems
Orientation
Researchers
Social Sciences
Wayfinding
Orientation
Spatial knowledge
Spatial descriptions
Wayfinding
Awareness
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Summary:Verbal descriptions are commonly used in daily lives for giving directions for wayfinding. They are valuable sources to understand underlying components that can contribute to spatial orientation, which is degrading with the growing use of routing services in navigation systems. Previous studies deconstruct and categorize all information embedded in spatial descriptions as a framework to investigate their roles in spatial orientation. Researchers look into the spatial descriptions given in different languages for their characteristics and suggest that characteristics vary in descriptions given in different languages. Adapting the same framework of categorizing information in spatial descriptions, this study compared directions given by English and Mandarin speakers. Results showed that the usage of orientation information is prominent in both languages. This type of information is not commonly included in routing services. Furthermore, comparisons between both languages revealed that English speakers provide detailed information to support orientation in wayfinding, which is different from some earlier suggestions derived from comparison between English and Japanese. This study also points out topics which are necessary for studies in the future.
ISSN:0343-2521
1572-9893
DOI:10.1007/s10708-020-10242-z