Integrative processing of concrete and abstract sentences

Abstract

Three experiments investigated whether abstract as well as concrete sentences can be processed in an integrated or holistic manner. In the first two studies, subjects learned a list of concrete or abstract sentences and then were given a cued-recall task in which cues were words which were not explicitly stated but were judged to represent particular characteristics of the situations described. The third study involved an incidental learning task after which recall of grammatical objects was cued with the subject, verb, or subject and verb of each sentence. Results consistently suggested that the processing of both concrete and abstract sentences involves the construction of particularized, holistic mental representations that contain both explicit information and inferences made on the basis of analysis of context and knowledge of language and the world. At the same time, however, clear concrete-abstract differences occurred in other aspects of recall performance. These and other recent findings suggest that integrative processing of both concrete and abstract material involves some common (perhaps amodal) representational system in addition to two modality-specific codes.