Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Deictic motion verbs require speakers to anchor motion to a perspective, yet the stability of perspective-taking in language use remains unclear. This study examines how Mandarin speakers produce and interpret lai 'come' and qu 'go' across twelve person-based conditions, focusing on the theoretically challenging qu2 contexts where motion occurs between non-speaker locations. In Experiment 1 (sentence completion), participants sometimes avoided deictic commitment by using the non-deictic verb dao 'arrive'; inappropriate responses were concentrated in qu2 contexts as predicted. In Experiment 2 (forced-choice between lai and qu), overall appropriateness increased, but the same vulnerability of qu2 persisted. These results reveal a robust asymmetry: while lai remains stable across contexts, qu is selectively vulnerable when the speaker is not a spatial anchor. This finding advances our understanding of deixis by highlighting that real-time deictic choice is shaped not only by lexical knowledge, but also by the dynamics of perspective-taking in discourse.