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  1. Does the mind care about whether a word is abstract or concrete? Why concreteness is probably not a natural kind.Guido Löhr - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (5):627-646.
    Many psychologists currently assume that there is a psychologically real distinction to be made between concepts that are abstract and concepts that are concrete. It is for example largely agreed that concepts and words are more easily processed if they are concrete. Moreover, it is assumed that this is because these words and concepts are concrete. It is thought that interesting generalizations can be made about certain concepts because they are concrete. I argue that we have surprisingly little reason to (...)
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  • Effects of social experience on abstract concepts in semantic priming.Zhao Yao, Yu Chai, Peiying Yang, Rong Zhao & Fei Wang - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    Humans can understand thousands of abstract words, even when they do not have clearly perceivable referents. Recent views highlight an important role of social experience in grounding of abstract concepts and sub-kinds of abstract concepts, but empirical work in this area is still in its early stages. In the present study, a picture-word semantic priming paradigm was employed to investigate the contribution effect of social experience that is provided by real-life pictures to social abstract concepts and emotional abstract concepts. Using (...)
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  • Language Processing Differences Between Blind and Sighted Individuals and the Abstract Versus Concrete Concept Difference.Enrique Canessa, Sergio E. Chaigneau & Sebastián Moreno - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (10):e13044.
    In the property listing task (PLT), participants are asked to list properties for a concept (e.g., for the concept dog, “barks,” and “is a pet” may be produced). In conceptual property norming (CPNs) studies, participants are asked to list properties for large sets of concepts. Here, we use a mathematical model of the property listing process to explore two longstanding issues: characterizing the difference between concrete and abstract concepts, and characterizing semantic knowledge in the blind versus sighted population. When we (...)
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  • Curb Your Embodiment.Diane Pecher - 2018 - Topics in Cognitive Science 10 (3):501-517.
    To explain how abstract concepts are grounded in sensory-motor experiences, several theories have been proposed. I will discuss two of these proposals, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Situated Cognition, and argue why they do not fully explain grounding. A central idea in Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that image schemas ground abstract concepts in concrete experiences. Image schemas might themselves be abstractions, however, and therefore do not solve the grounding problem. Moreover, image schemas are too simple to explain the full richness of (...)
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  • Embodied Simulations Are Modulated by Sentential Perspective.O. Dam Wessel & H. Desai Rutvik - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (6):1613-1628.
    There is considerable evidence that language comprehenders derive lexical-semantic meaning by mentally simulating perceptual and motor attributes of described events. However, the nature of these simulations—including the level of detail that is incorporated and contexts under which simulations occur—is not well understood. Here, we examine the effects of first- versus third-person perspective on mental simulations during sentence comprehension. First-person sentences describing physical transfer towards or away from the body modulated response latencies when responses were made along a front-back axis, consistent (...)
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  • Measuring inconsistencies can lead you forward: Imageability and the x-ception theory.Sara Dellantonio, Claudio Mulatti, Luigi Pastore & Remo Job - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
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  • Exploring the Potential of Concept Associations for the Creative Generation of Linguistic Artifacts: A Case Study With Riddles and Rhetorical Figures.Virginia Francisco, Raquel Hervás, Gonzalo Méndez & Paloma Galván - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
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  • Symbol Grounding Without Direct Experience: Do Words Inherit Sensorimotor Activation From Purely Linguistic Context?Fritz Günther, Carolin Dudschig & Barbara Kaup - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (S2):336-374.
    Theories of embodied cognition assume that concepts are grounded in non-linguistic, sensorimotor experience. In support of this assumption, previous studies have shown that upwards response movements are faster than downwards movements after participants have been presented with words whose referents are typically located in the upper vertical space. This is taken as evidence that processing these words reactivates sensorimotor experiential traces. This congruency effect was also found for novel words, after participants learned these words as labels for novel objects that (...)
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  • The non-stop road from concrete to abstract: high concreteness causes the activation of long-range networks.Sabine Weiss & Horst M. Müller - 2013 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7.
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  • Strength of perceptual experience predicts word processing performance better than concreteness or imageability.Louise Connell & Dermot Lynott - 2012 - Cognition 125 (3):452-465.
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  • Beyond perceptual symbols: A call for representational pluralism.Guy Dove - 2009 - Cognition 110 (3):412-431.
    Recent evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that certain cognitive processes employ perceptual representations. Inspired by this evidence, a few researchers have proposed that cognition is inherently perceptual. They have developed an innovative theoretical approach that rests on the notion of perceptual simulation and marshaled several general arguments supporting the centrality of perceptual representations to concepts. In this article, I identify a number of weaknesses in these arguments and defend a multiple semantic code approach that posits both perceptual and non-perceptual representations.
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  • Color associations in abstract semantic domains.Douglas Guilbeault, Ethan O. Nadler, Mark Chu, Donald Ruggiero Lo Sardo, Aabir Abubaker Kar & Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan - 2020 - Cognition 201 (C):104306.
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  • Defining a Conceptual Topography of Word Concreteness: Clustering Properties of Emotion, Sensation, and Magnitude among 750 English Words.Joshua Troche, Sebastian J. Crutch & Jamie Reilly - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8.
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  • Metaphor and Meaning in Early China.Edward Slingerland - 2011 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 10 (1):1-30.
    Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese thought. The article reviews empirical evidence supporting the claims that human thought is fundamentally imagistic; that sensorimotor schemas are often used to structure our understanding (...)
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  • Effects of Emotional Experience for Abstract Words in the Stroop Task.Paul D. Siakaluk, Nathan Knol & Penny M. Pexman - 2014 - Cognitive Science 38 (8):1698-1717.
    In this study, we examined the effects of emotional experience, a relatively new dimension of emotional knowledge that gauges the ease with which words evoke emotional experience, on abstract word processing in the Stroop task. In order to test the context-dependency of these effects, we accentuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1A by blocking the stimuli such that one block consisted of the stimuli with the highest emotional experience ratings and the other block consisted of the stimuli with (...)
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  • The Semantic Content of Abstract Concepts: A Property Listing Study of 296 Abstract Words.Marcel Harpaintner, Natalie M. Trumpp & Markus Kiefer - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
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  • Human-Animal Similarity and the Imageability of Mental State Concepts for Mentalizing Animals.Esmeralda G. Urquiza-Haas & Kurt Kotrschal - 2022 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 22 (3-4):220-245.
    The attribution of mental states (MS) to other species typically follows ascala naturaepattern. However, “simple” mental states, including emotions, sensing, and feelings are attributed to a wider range of animals as compared to the so-called “higher” cognitive abilities. We propose that such attributions are based on the perceptual quality (i.e.imageability) of mental representations related toMSconcepts. We hypothesized that the attribution of highly imaginableMSis more dependent on the familiarity of participants with animals when compared to the attribution ofMSlow in imageability. In (...)
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  • A Quantitative Empirical Analysis of the Abstract/Concrete Distinction.Felix Hill, Anna Korhonen & Christian Bentz - 2014 - Cognitive Science 38 (1):162-177.
    This study presents original evidence that abstract and concrete concepts are organized and represented differently in the mind, based on analyses of thousands of concepts in publicly available data sets and computational resources. First, we show that abstract and concrete concepts have differing patterns of association with other concepts. Second, we test recent hypotheses that abstract concepts are organized according to association, whereas concrete concepts are organized according to (semantic) similarity. Third, we present evidence suggesting that concrete representations are more (...)
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  • How Polysemy Affects Concreteness Ratings: The Case of Metaphor.W. Gudrun Reijnierse, Christian Burgers, Marianna Bolognesi & Tina Krennmayr - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (8):e12779.
    Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the validity of concreteness‐ratings studies. This is particularly relevant to metaphorical words, which typically describe something abstract in terms of something more concrete. To investigate whether perceived concreteness ratings differ for metaphorical versus non‐metaphorical (...)
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  • Abstract Concepts and Pictures of Real‐World Situations Activate One Another.Ken McRae, Daniel Nedjadrasul, Raymond Pau, Bethany Pui-Hei Lo & Lisa King - 2018 - Topics in Cognitive Science 10 (3):518-532.
    concepts typically are defined in terms of lacking physical or perceptual referents. We argue instead that they are not devoid of perceptual information because knowledge of real-world situations is an important component of learning and using many abstract concepts. Although the relationship between perceptual information and abstract concepts is less straightforward than for concrete concepts, situation-based perceptual knowledge is part of many abstract concepts. In Experiment 1, participants made lexical decisions to abstract words that were preceded by related and unrelated (...)
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  • Predicate order and coherence in copredication.Elliot Murphy - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6):1744-1780.
    This article proposes that predicate order and coherence relations are the two major determining factors in copredication licensing, resolving a long-standing puzzle over the criteria for constructing acceptable copredications. The effects of predicate ordering are claimed to be anchored around semantic complexity, such that copredications with semantically Simple–Complex predicate orderings are more acceptable than the reverse. This motivates a parsing bias, termed Incremental Semantic Complexity. Particular ways of implementing this parsing bias are discussed. The effect of predicate coherence is claimed (...)
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  • What do you want? How perceivers use cues to make goal inferences about others.Joseph P. Magliano, John J. Skowronski, M. Anne Britt, C. Dominik Güss & Chris Forsythe - 2008 - Cognition 106 (2):594-632.
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  • Adult Age Differences in the Use of Conceptual Combination as an Associative Encoding Strategy.Heather D. Lucas, Resh S. Gupta, Ryan J. Hubbard & Kara D. Federmeier - 2019 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 13.
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