Visually perceived spatial distance affects the interpretation of linguistically mediated social meaning during online language comprehension: An eye tracking reading study

We examined to what extent object distance effects on sentence interpretation depend upon a one-to-one mapping (relating objects to nouns). The eye-tracking record showed that spatial distance effects extended to abstract language other than semantic similarity and that these effects occurred as soon as the readers encountered linguistic information about social relations – independent of whether that information was conveyed by the (coordinated) nouns or by other constituents. Finally, the direction of the spatial distance effects seemed to depend on the activation level of the spatial distance representations, as determined by the constituent order. We discuss the contribution of these results to accounts of situated sentence comprehension.
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research