Spatial demonstratives (words like ‘this’ and ‘that’) are thought to map onto a distinction between near and far space. Yet, when people are asked to pair a noun with a demonstrative without any spatial context, choices tend to be non-random. Over a number of large-scale online experiments, I investigated which semantic features of a referent determine which demonstrative people tend to use to refer to it.
Using PCA and multilevel linear modeling, we found that demonstrative choice is systematically influenced by a range of factors including manipulability, valence, and potential for motion. Importantly, the resulting experimental paradigm (the ‘demonstrative choice task’) has been used across a number of languages displaying consistent results, and it is currently being used in follow-up studies to investigate whether linguistic behavior in the demonstrative choice task can be used as predictor of personality and clinical traits.
Studies from my PhD using this paradigm have been published in PlosOne, Frontiers in Psychology, and Language and Cognition, and two more are currently in progress.