Concreteness as a Variable in Word Recognition

Abstract

Two experiments using five lists of words were conducted to explore the effects of the concreteness or abstractness of words on their tachistoscopic recognition. The first experiment, using two lists patterned after those of Galbraith and Underwood, was inconclusive. The second experiment showed a consistent effect of concreteness. It is argued that this effect is a result of effective (personal) word frequency over the course of development, rather than semantic factors. Galbraith and Underwood (1973) investigated the perceived frequency of concrete and abstract English words. They used pairs of words whose members represented opposite ends of the dimension from concreteness to abstractness; the members of a pair were equated on measured frequency of occurrence, length, and number of syllables. In paired-comparison tasks, their subjects rated the abstract words as more frequent in usage than the concrete words of the same measured (objective) frequency in natural language. Since Howes (1954) had previously found that judged frequency of occurrence in a paired-comparison task was highly correlated with measured frequency of occurrence in Thorndike and Lorge's (1944) word count, Galbraith and Underwood showed that Howes's conclusion needed to be qualified to include the finding that concreteness alters perceived frequency of usage. The present studies explored the relevance of these results for theories of word recognition. In studies of word recognition, word frequency has been shown to influence recognition thresholds (Howes and Solomon, 1951). An obvious question is whether that relationship is altered by concreteness or abstractness in the same manner that judgments of frequency are. Thus, words matched for frequency, length, and number of syllables, but either concrete or abstract, were presented for recognition in the tachistoscope. The basic research questions were whether the recognition thresholds for concrete words would differ from those for abstract words, and if so, the direction of that difference.