Abstract
BackgroundEvidence for the brain mechanisms recruited when processing concrete versus abstract concepts has been largely derived from studies employing visual stimuli. The tasks and baseline contrasts used have also involved varying degrees of lexical processing. This study investigated the neural basis of the concreteness effect during spoken word recognition and employed a lexical decision task with a novel pseudoword condition.MethodsThe participants were seventeen healthy young adults (9 females). The stimuli consisted of (a) concrete, high imageability nouns, (b) abstract, low imageability nouns and (c) opaque legal pseudowords presented in a pseudorandomised, event-related design. Activation for the concrete, abstract and pseudoword conditions was analysed using anatomical regions of interest derived from previous findings of concrete and abstract word processing.ResultsBehaviourally, lexical decision reaction times for the concrete condition were significantly faster than both abstract and pseudoword conditions and the abstract condition was significantly faster than the pseudoword condition (p < 0.05). The region of interest analysis showed significantly greater activity for concrete versus abstract conditions in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate and bilaterally in the angular gyrus. There were no significant differences between abstract and concrete conditions in the left superior temporal gyrus or inferior frontal gyrus.ConclusionsThese findings confirm the involvement of the bilateral angular gyrus, left posterior cingulate and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in retrieving concrete versus abstract concepts during spoken word recognition. Significant activity was also elicited by concrete words relative to pseudowords in the left fusiform and left anterior middle temporal gyrus. These findings confirm the involvement of a widely distributed network of brain regions that are activated in response to the spoken recognition of concrete but not abstract words. Our findings are consistent with the proposal that distinct brain regions are engaged as convergence zones and enable the binding of supramodal input.
Highlights
Evidence for the brain mechanisms recruited when processing concrete versus abstract concepts has been largely derived from studies employing visual stimuli
Participants responded fastest to concrete words followed by abstract words pseudowords with a significant difference between each condition
Increased Blood-oxygen level dependency (BOLD) signal was observed for concrete (p < 0.0001) and abstract (p = 0.008) compared to pseudowords and concrete compared to abstract words (p < 0.0001)
Summary
Evidence for the brain mechanisms recruited when processing concrete versus abstract concepts has been largely derived from studies employing visual stimuli. Previous language studies have attempted to unravel some of the complexities surrounding the organisation and access of semantic conceptual representations and have investigated processing differences between concrete and abstract words. Behavioural evidence from healthy individuals has demonstrated that concrete items are processed faster and more accurately than abstract items [1,5,6,7]. The reverse effect, where abstract words are able to be processed more efficiently than concrete words has been observed [4,13,14,15,16] This reversal of behavioural effects has been used to suggest the possible independent storage of these conceptual representations
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