Abstract
There are considerable gaps in our knowledge of how children develop abstract language. In this paper, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account, which proposes that emotional information is more essential for abstract than concrete conceptual development. We tested the recognition memory of 7- and 8-year-old children, as well as a group of adults, for abstract and concrete words which differed categorically in valence (negative, neutral, and positive). Word valence significantly interacted with concreteness in hit rates of both children and adults, such that effects of valence were only found in memory for abstract words. The pattern of valence effects differed for children and adults: children remembered negative words more accurately than neutral and positive words (a negativity effect), whereas adults remembered negative and positive words more accurately than neutral words (a negativity effect and a positivity effect). In addition, signal detection analysis revealed that children were better able to discriminate negative than positive words, regardless of concreteness. The findings suggest that the memory accuracy of 7- and 8-year-old children is influenced by emotional information, particularly for abstract words. The results are in agreement with the Affective Embodiment Account and with multimodal accounts of children’s lexical development.
Highlights
Abstract words refer to concepts that are difficult to experience through the senses, like truth, love, and think
We tested predictions derived from the Affective Embodiment Account, that emotional enhancement might be stronger for abstract words than for concrete words
We measured several aspects of children’s and adults’ memory performance. One of these provided support for the Affective Embodiment Account: we found interactions of valence and concreteness in both children’s and adults’ hit rates, such that effects of valence were significant for abstract but not for concrete word memory
Summary
Abstract words refer to concepts that are difficult to experience through the senses, like truth, love, and think. The goal of the present study was to address this question. It has been a challenge for some theories of lexical and conceptual knowledge to explain the acquisition of abstract concepts. Strongly embodied accounts assume that all knowledge is grounded in sensory, motor, and emotion systems (e.g., Glenberg and Gallese, 2012; Glenberg, 2015). In between lie multimodal accounts, which suggest that knowledge is represented in language, emotion, Emotion, Concreteness, and Children’s Memory perceptual, sensory, and motor systems, and that the influence of each system depends on the types of concepts being processed (e.g., Barsalou et al, 2008; Borghi et al, 2017)
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