A longstanding debate in cognitive psychology concerns whether information is represented in an abstract/amodal or a concrete/modal format. Recently, this dualism has been increasingly abandoned in favor of a more flexible view, where different representational formats can co-exist and serve specific cognitive functions (see Kaup et al., 2023). For example, Construal Level Theory suggests that objects or events are represented more abstractly when more distant from the self, whether in spatial, temporal, or social terms (Trope & Liberman, 2010). In two online studies, we investigated whether this association of abstraction and distance can be observed in language comprehension. We presented participants with incomplete sentences that either specified a near or distant location (“In Regensburg/Philadelphia, the man eats …”) or an object described on a lower or higher category level (“The man eats pudding/dessert in …”). Participants were asked to complete a single sentence beginning with one of two possible endings (forced-choice, Exp. 1) or to match two possible endings to two sentence beginnings (matching task, Exp. 2). In addition, to investigate the role of social distance, sentences were formulated in either third-person or self-perspective. We observed a reliable association between category level and spatial distance in the matching but not the forced-choice task, presumably because the matching task provides a reference frame to interpret the relative distances and category levels. As first- compared to third-person perspective did not increase the strength of this association, we suggest that social distance is not a strong determinant of abstraction level in this task.