Guerra, E. & Knoeferle, P.
Cognitive Interaction Technology Excellent Cluster, Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany
Embodied language research provides evidence for the involvement of perceptual processes during language comprehension. Moreover, it has been proposed that abstract concepts (e.g., similarity) are linked to experiential concepts (e.g., distance). This hypothesis was recently experimentally studied and results suggest that the distance between objects/words influences how people judge their similarity. However, no studies have examined this hypothesis during incremental language comprehension. Complementarily, psycholinguistic research has shown that non-linguistic visual information can rapidly inform language comprehension when language refers to visual context. To examine both the comprehension of abstract sentences and visual context effects further we asked whether a) visually depicted distance can affect incremental semantic interpretation of abstract sentences, and whether b) a visual context without explicit links to linguistic content can modulate real-time language comprehension. Analyses of data (N=32) from two eye-tracking reading studies revealed first-pass effects of word (Experiment 1) and card (Experiment 2) distance on incremental semantic interpretation of abstract sentences, implicating more than just a referential mechanism. The rapid (first-pass) and extended time course of the effects suggests further that relating spatial distance to abstract content is instantaneous and part and parcel of ongoing semantic interpretation.