Psychiatry and Psychology Commons^™

Referential Indexing: The Role Of Space In Reference Processing, Cameron Smith

Theses and Dissertations

A number of studies have suggested that spatial representations are used during language comprehension in a number of different paradigms (e.g. Ferreira et al., 2008; Gunter et al., 2015). These studies have largely focused on the visual modality, suggesting that people may use spatial cues in the visual environment to aid them in language comprehension. Importantly, the primary modality of spoken language is audition, which raises the question of whether the reliance on spatial information is specific to referents that are visible or at least were visible at some point. Thus, in this study, we examined whether spatial representations are …