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editorial

. 2016 Feb 16;7:222. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00222

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Copyright © 2016 Peeters and Özyürek.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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(A) Participants in Peeters et al. (2015b) were presented with picture stimuli in which a person pointed at one of two objects while they listened to an auditorily presented sentence that contained either a proximal or a distal demonstrative (e.g., “I have bought this/that apple at the market”). (B) Analysis of participants' event-related potentials (ERPs) as derived from their electroencephalograms (EEGs), time-locked to the onset of the demonstrative, suggested a higher processing cost for distal compared to proximal demonstratives when both objects were in the shared space between speaker and participant (as in the picture), irrespective of the distance of the referent-object to the speaker. (C) This effect had a fronto-central distribution over the scalp. The topographic plot shows the locus of the effect over the scalp averaged between 100 and 500 ms after the onset of the spoken demonstrative. (D) This finding suggests that speaker and addressee may create a shared space in which all referents become psychologically proximal.