Visually perceived spatial distance affects the interpretation of linguistically mediated social meaning during online language comprehension: An eye tracking reading study

• We examined visual context effects on social relations processing during reading.
• We tested the mechanisms active in relating spatial distance to sentence meaning.
• We asked if visual context-to-sentence mapping required relating objects to nouns.
• Effects appeared before the reader could map visual objects to sentential nouns.
• An activation-based account fits these effects and their qualitative variation.

Recent experimental evidence suggests that spatial distance between two depicted objects in a non-referential visual context (i.e., when neither spatial distance nor the objects were mentioned) can rapidly and incrementally modulate the processing of semantic similarity between and-coordinated subject noun phrases in a sentence. The present research examines in three eye-tracking reading experiments whether these spatial distance effects extend to another abstract domain (social relations). More importantly, we assessed how precisely cognitive mechanisms link spatial information to sentence interpretation. To this end we varied between experiments the (order of the) constituents conveying information about social relations. We examined to what extent object distance effects on sentence interpretation depend upon a one-to-one mapping (relating objects to nouns). The eye-tracking record showed that spatial distance effects extended to abstract language other than semantic similarity and that these effects occurred as soon as the readers encountered linguistic information about social relations – independent of whether that information was conveyed by the (coordinated) nouns or by other constituents. Finally, the direction of the spatial distance effects seemed to depend on the activation level of the spatial distance representations, as determined by the constituent order. We discuss the contribution of these results to accounts of situated sentence comprehension.