Semantic and pragmatic factors in the representation of “near” and “far”

The processing of two spatial terms which refer to proximity and distance, near and far, was investigated in a word-picture comparison task. Two alternative hypotheses were tested, one based on the notion of linguistic markedness and supporting the positive status of far, and the other based on semantic-pragmatic factors and proposing that near is the positive member of the pair. An analysis of the true-false decision latencies indicated that near was generally verified faster than far in judgments in which the terms were used to describe both ego-to-object and object-to-object distance. A third experiment addressed the question of whether the advantage obtained in the verification of near may be accounted for in terms of the priority of the interpersonal dimension of representation relative to the objective one. The results are discussed with regard to the semantic representation of the two words.