Spatial and social cognition jointly determine multimodal demonstrative reference: Experimental evidence from Turkish and Spanish

Abstract

All languages in the world have demonstrative terms such as ‘this’ and ‘that’ in English, which have traditionally been treated as spatial words. Here we aim to provide experimental evidence that demonstrative choice is jointly determined by spatial considerations (e.g., whether the referent is near or far) and socio-cognitive factors (e.g., the listener's attention focus). We also test whether demonstrative choice varies depending on the speaker's use of pointing, to provide evidence for a multimodal account of demonstrative systems. We focus on the Turkish system and compare it with the Spanish one to better understand the cross-linguistic variability of 3-term demonstrative systems. Corpus studies have suggested that the Turkish proximal ‘bu’ and distal ‘o’ mark a spatial contrast between near and far space, whereas the medial ‘şu’ is used to direct the listener's attention to a new referent. Supporting this analysis, an online experiment using a picture-based demonstrative-choice task revealed that the medial form ‘şu’ was preferred when the listener was looking at the wrong object. The results of a second experiment using video stimuli further showed that the medial ‘şu’ was preferred when the speaker pointed to the referent to direct the listener's attention, whereas the proximal demonstrative was used in near space and the distal in far space, mostly in joint attention and without pointing. The results of a third experiment in Spanish showed radically different patterns of demonstrative-pointing use. The medial ‘ese’ was preferred in joint attention, whereas the proximal ‘este’ and distal ‘aquel’ were selected to direct the listener's attention towards the intended referent but without an effect of pointing. Our results confirm that demonstrative choice within a given system is determined by both spatial and socio-cognitive factors, interacting with pointing patterns and varying across languages. Leveraging recent experimental work in several languages, we interpret these findings as further evidence for the weighted parameters framework (e.g., referent position and listener attention), which explains demonstrative choice beyond previous categorical analyses.