Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Spatial demonstratives, i.e. words like this and that, serve asimportant tools to establish joint attention, allowinginterlocutors to flexibly share spatial reference schemes.However, little experimental work has investigated whichperceptual and social factors drive speakers’ choices ofdemonstrative forms. We used a novel experimental paradigmto explore 1) the role of relative placement of competingreferents on the sagittal and lateral planes, 2) whether and howthe presence of an addressee modulates the speaker’s choice ofdemonstrative forms. We found that the choice ofdemonstratives is affected by the relative position ofcompeting referents both on the sagittal and lateral plane.Furthermore, we found that the presence of an interlocutorshifts attraction for proximal demonstratives towards theshared space of reference, but only in collaborative contexts.Together, these results suggest that spatial deixis is groundedin a contrastive organization of space tightly coupled to manualand social affordances.