中文摘要：

人们通常用定性的词汇描述空间关系，而地理信息系统都采用定量的方法，这就限制了地理信息系统表达地理空间信息的能力。为了建立自然语言表达的空间关系和空间关系计算模型之间的桥梁，开发能更容易被广大的非专业人士使用掌握的自然语言的地理信息系统界面，充分理解自然语言所表达的空间关系和物体是十分必要的。本文通过认知实验的方法研究了英语自然语言对两个线状地物的空间关系的理解，发现地理特征之间的几何关系和拓扑关系是影响人们对空间关系的描述的主要影响因子，并且在不同的情况下，它们的影响程度不同。研究还发现，在有些情况下上下文的语境也对空间关系的描述有一定的影响。

英文摘要：

People usually use qualitative terms to express spatial relations, while current geographic information systems （GIS） all use quantitative description to store spatial information. The abilities of current GIS to represent spatial information about geographic space are limited, and it is inconvenient for GIS users without professional training. The next generation of GIS could be intelligent GIS built on Na 1 ve Geography. It will act and a person would, and therefore can be used without major training by new user communities to solve tasks. In order to bridge the gap between natural-language terms and the computational model of spatial respond as day-to-day relations, a complete understanding of the relationship between the ambiguous natural-language representations and the geo- metric spatial relations of geographic objects is requisite. A human-subjects test was conducted to find out how nat- ural-language descriptions of spatial relations of linear objects are determined by the geometric configurations of the objects. A series of maps, with each map showing two linear geographic objects, were displayed to the human sub- jects, and a sentence describing the spatial relations of the two objects was provided to the subjects. Comparing the sentence to the map, the participants determined whether this sentence described the relation correctly, and chose their agreement from given options ranged from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. The answers chosen by the human subjects were converted to agreement degrees which represent the plausibility that certain spatial relations can be described by the spatial predicates, so the results could be analyzed quantitatively. The results indicated that both topology and metric properties influent people on choosing spatial predicates to describe spatial relations, but they have different effects on various spatial predicates. Some spatial predicates are mainly affected by topological relations, while metric measures do not have significant effects. Other spa