Electrophysiological evidence for the role of shared space in online comprehension of spatial demonstratives

Abstract

a b s t r a c tA fundamental property of language is that it can be used to refer to entities in the extralinguistic physical context of a conversation in order to establish a joint focus of attention on a referent. Typological and psycholinguistic work across a wide range of languages has put forward at least two different theoretical views on demonstrative reference. Here we contrasted and tested these two accounts by investigating the electrophysiological brain activity underlying the construction of indexical meaning in comprehension. In two EEG experiments, participants watched pictures of a speaker who referred to one of two objects using speech and an index-finger pointing gesture. In contrast with separately collected native speakers' linguistic intuitions, N400 effects showed a preference for a proximal demonstrative when speaker and addressee were in a face-to-face orientation and all possible referents were located in the shared space between them, irrespective of the physical proximity of the referent to the speaker. These findings reject egocentric proximity-based accounts of demonstrative reference, support a sociocentric approach to deixis, suggest that interlocutors construe a shared space during conversation, and imply that the psychological proximity of a referent may be more important than its physical proximity.

Recipient Design in Communicative Pointing

“…Here, we show that those trajectory modifications increase the informational value of the pointing movement, when seen from the spatial perspective of the addressee, which was not yet implied by the previous observations on this data set (Murillo Oosterwijk et al., ). This observation lends itself to be interpreted in terms of recipient design, in line with previous observations suggesting that communicators organize their movement in an inferential perspective centered on the addressee (Blokpoel et al., ; Heller, Grodner, & Tanenhaus, ; Peeters, Hagoort, & Özyürek, ; Surtees, Apperly, & Samson, ). By the same token, the current findings are not immediately compatible with accounts that consider recipient design exclusively as a communicative repair operation (Horton & Keysar, ).…”

“…This study adds to previous work on communicative pointing by quantifying the informative value of those movements. For instance, it is known that communicative pointing results in more emphatic pointing stroke duration (Peeters, Hagoort, & Ozyurek, ) and longer holding times than those evoked in control conditions (Murillo Oosterwijk et al., ). Furthermore, the trajectories of communicative pointing movements are influenced by the spatial location of the addressee (Murillo Oosterwijk et al., ).…”

What explains demonstrative variance in Dutch?

“…At the same time, recent experimental work makes clear that space cannot be the sole basis of demonstrative variation. An interesting recent study in this respect is Peeters, Hagoort and Özyürek (2015), which suggests that interlocutors construe a shared space during conversation, whereby psychological proximity of a referent may be more important than its physical proximity.…”

Linking language to the visual world: Neural correlates of comprehending verbal reference to objects through pointing and visual cues

“…Similarly, in half of the saliency pictures the object at her left was framed and in the other half the object at her right. The 40 different table-top objects in the pictures were selected on the basis of a pre-test reported elsewhere (Peeters et al, 2015b) that confirmed that these objects elicited highly consistent labels (i.e. > 90% naming consistency for each object across 16 participants) across individuals from the same participant pool as the current participants.…”

“…Pointing gestures may single out an object from a larger set of potential referents while speech may concomitantly describe the object (Bühler, 1934;Clark and Bangerter, 2004), as in someone pointing at an apple while saying "I have bought this apple at the market this morning" (Peeters et al, 2015b). Previous work suggests that conceptual matching between auditory and visual information may recruit pMTG (e.g., Dick et al, 2014).…”