Abstractness, imagery, and meaningfulness in paired-associate learning

Abstract

Summary Subjects were given alternate learning trials (auditory presentation of pairs) and recall trials (presentation of stimuli) on a list of paired-associates composed of concrete and abstract nouns. On the assumption that concrete nouns are superior to abstract nouns in their capacity to elicit sensory images, and that imagery can mediate the formation of an associative connection between members of a pair, it was expected that learning would be particularly facilitated with the concrete nouns as stimuli. Thus, the predicted learning difficulty of four stimulus-response combinations was as follows: concrete-concrete, concrete-abstract, abstract-concrete, and abstract-abstract, in increasing order of difficulty. Analysis of recall scores strongly supported that prediction. The words were also rated on the ease with which they arouse sensory images. As expected, the concrete nouns were consistently rated higher than abstract nouns on this attribute. Other data indicated that the concrete nouns were also higher in associative meaningfulness and auditory familiarity and that the three measured attributes of the words were substantially correlated. Several possible interpretations of the findings were considered.