A test of the symbol interdependency hypothesis with both concrete and abstract stimuli.

Simritpal Kaur Malhi,Lori Buchanan,Francesco Di Russo

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0192719

Abstract

In Experiment 1, the symbol interdependency hypothesis was tested with both concrete and abstract stimuli. Symbolic (i.e., semantic neighbourhood distance) and embodied (i.e., iconicity) factors were manipulated in two tasks—one that tapped symbolic relations (i.e., semantic relatedness judgment) and another that tapped embodied relations (i.e., iconicity judgment). Results supported the symbol interdependency hypothesis in that the symbolic factor was recruited for the semantic relatedness task and the embodied factor was recruited for the iconicity task. Across tasks, and especially in the iconicity task, abstract stimuli resulted in shorter RTs. This finding was in contrast to the concreteness effect where concrete words result in shorter RTs. Experiment 2 followed up on this finding by replicating the iconicity task from Experiment 1 in an ERP paradigm. Behavioural results continued to show a reverse concreteness effect with shorter RTs for abstract stimuli. However, ERP results paralleled the N400 and anterior N700 concreteness effects found in the literature, with more negative amplitudes for concrete stimuli.

Highlights

Understanding the mechanism through which humans obtain meaning from words has been an ongoing pursuit for researchers in the area of psycholinguistics
A minimum accuracy rate of 70% was used for both participants and words
Participant mean logged RTs, standard deviations (SDs), and error rates per condition for the final data set are displayed in Table 3 for the semantic relatedness task and Table 4 for the iconicity task

Summary

Introduction

Understanding the mechanism through which humans obtain meaning from words has been an ongoing pursuit for researchers in the area of psycholinguistics. Various theories have been proposed to explain how we understand words in general and how we understand concrete versus abstract words. A review of these theories and their associated empirical findings follows (see Table 1 for a summary). This will set the stage for the present study which will test the symbol interdependency hypothesis using a stimulus set that taps into concrete and abstract relationships in a novel way. We are not considering symbolic approaches to cognition in general, but rather, we are using a constrained definition of symbolic theory here to discuss a particular type of symbolic theory relevant to the semantic

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion