English spatial term assignment can involve some level of ambiguity, in that a single preposition may map onto a different area of space depending upon contextual issues involved in the assignment. For example, a located object can be said to be "above" a reference object in different ways: (1) according to properties of the environment, (2) according to properties of the reference object, and (3) according to properties of the viewers of the scene. In some situations, these three different frames of reference will predict the same spatial term assignments; however, they oftentimes make conflicting assignments. When a conflict does exist among the frames, English speakers must choose which assignment they will deem as appropriate to a given situation. But how do they go about making this decision? The proposed study investigates the use of these frames of reference in disambiguating the areas of space that can be represented by the horizontal axis spatial expressions (for example, "in front of" and "to the left of"). Specifically, I expect that the properties of the objects, such as their inherent features and the way in which they work together to fulfill some type of real-world function, will play a crucial role and that increasing the salience of these properties should increase the use of an object-centered frame of reference. I also expect that properties of the language used to talk about the space will have an effect. The labels assigned to the objects and the syntactic structure of the spatial expressions should carry information that may hide or highlight particular properties of the objects that may be used to select a reference frame. For the present set of studies, I will use a sentence-appropriateness rating paradigm to examine the aforementioned properties.