Abstract
While embodied approaches of cognition have proved to be successful in explaining concrete concepts and words, they have more difficulties in accounting for abstract concepts and words, and several proposals have been put forward. This work aims to test the Words As Tools proposal, according to which both abstract and concrete concepts are grounded in perception, action and emotional systems, but linguistic information is more important for abstract than for concrete concept representation, due to the different ways they are acquired: while for the acquisition of the latter linguistic information might play a role, for the acquisition of the former it is instead crucial. We investigated the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts and words, and verified its impact on conceptual representation. In Experiment 1, participants explored and categorized novel concrete and abstract entities, and were taught a novel label for each category. Later they performed a categorical recognition task and an image-word matching task to verify a) whether and how the introduction of language changed the previously formed categories, b) whether language had a major weight for abstract than for concrete words representation, and c) whether this difference had consequences on bodily responses. The results confirm that, even though both concrete and abstract concepts are grounded, language facilitates the acquisition of the latter and plays a major role in their representation, resulting in faster responses with the mouth, typically associated with language production. Experiment 2 was a rating test aiming to verify whether the findings of Experiment 1 were simply due to heterogeneity, i.e. to the fact that the members of abstract categories were more heterogeneous than those of concrete categories. The results confirmed the effectiveness of our operationalization, showing that abstract concepts are more associated with the mouth and concrete ones with the hand, independently from heterogeneity.
Highlights
Categorizing objects and entities and using the appropriate names to designate them is a crucial ability of humans
We will consider abstract concepts as different from concrete ones for three main characteristics: a. differently from concrete concepts, they are typically not grounded in single objects but rather in situations, scenes, relations between objects [4]; b. for this reason, they are typically more complex [2]; c. compared to concrete concepts, they are characterized by a higher variability both within and across subjects
We analyzed response times and the distance between the participants’ categories and the categories established by the experimenters
Summary
Categorizing objects and entities and using the appropriate names to designate them is a crucial ability of humans. The difficulty in operationalizing the distinction has led some researchers to argue that, rather than a dichotomy between the two kinds of concepts, a continuum is present, encompassing different kinds of concepts that differ in abstractness levels [1]. The more they are complex and detached from physical entities, which are perceivable through the senses, the more the concepts can be considered as abstract [2]. Differently from concrete concepts, they are typically not grounded in single objects but rather in situations, scenes, relations between objects [4]; b. We will consider abstract concepts as different from concrete ones for three main characteristics (see [3] for more details): a. differently from concrete concepts, they are typically not grounded in single objects but rather in situations, scenes, relations between objects [4]; b. for this reason, they are typically more complex [2]; c. compared to concrete concepts, they are characterized by a higher variability both within and across subjects
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