Abstract
This study explores the impact of the extensive use of an oral device since infancy (pacifier) on the acquisition of concrete, abstract, and emotional concepts. While recent evidence showed a negative relation between pacifier use and children's emotional competence (Niedenthal et al., 2012), the possible interaction between use of pacifier and processing of emotional and abstract language has not been investigated. According to recent theories, while all concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience, abstract concepts activate linguistic and social information more than concrete ones. Specifically, the Words As Social Tools (WAT) proposal predicts that the simulation of their meaning leads to an activation of the mouth (Borghi and Binkofski, 2014; Borghi and Zarcone, 2016). Since the pacifier affects facial mimicry forcing mouth muscles into a static position, we hypothesize its possible interference on acquisition/consolidation of abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional concepts, which are mainly conveyed during social and linguistic interactions, than of concrete concepts. Fifty-nine first grade children, with a history of different frequency of pacifier use, provided oral definitions of the meaning of abstract not-emotional, abstract emotional, and concrete words. Main effect of concept type emerged, with higher accuracy in defining concrete and abstract emotional concepts with respect to abstract not-emotional concepts, independently from pacifier use. Accuracy in definitions was not influenced by the use of pacifier, but correspondence and hierarchical clustering analyses suggest that the use of pacifier differently modulates the conceptual relations elicited by abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional. While the majority of the children produced a similar pattern of conceptual relations, analyses on the few (6) children who overused the pacifier (for more than 3 years) showed that they tend to distinguish less clearly between concrete and abstract emotional concepts and between concrete and abstract not-emotional concepts than children who did not use it (5) or used it for short (17). As to the conceptual relations they produced, children who overused the pacifier tended to refer less to their experience and to social and emotional situations, use more exemplifications and functional relations, and less free associations.
Highlights
Embodied and Grounded Views and Abstract Concepts RepresentationThe difficulty in acquiring and processing abstract concepts, such as “freedom” and “phantasy” is widely recognized: they have been named “hard words” (Gleitman et al, 2005; Gentner, 2006)! The way in which we represent abstract concepts has become hotly debated in the last years, due to the growing interest for them in the context of embodied and grounded (EG) views of cognition
Correspondence analysis (CA) was used to explore relationships among our categorical variables (Concepts type and Pacifier use) and the conceptual relations used in the word definition task
Conceptual Content of Definitions Correspondence analysis (CA) was used to explore relationships among our categorical variables (Concepts type and Pacifier use) and the conceptual relations used in the word definition task, which we named “Definitions” Features’
Summary
Embodied and Grounded Views and Abstract Concepts RepresentationThe difficulty in acquiring and processing abstract concepts, such as “freedom” and “phantasy” is widely recognized: they have been named “hard words” (Gleitman et al, 2005; Gentner, 2006)! The way in which we represent abstract concepts has become hotly debated in the last years, due to the growing interest for them in the context of embodied and grounded (EG) views of cognition (for overviews, see Dove, 2011, 2016; Pecher et al, 2011; Tomasino and Rumiati, 2013; Borghi and Binkofski, 2014; Reilly et al, 2016; for overviews showing the importance of abstract concepts for EG views, see Kiefer and Pulvermüller, 2012; Borghi et al, 2017). Concrete concepts are typically processed faster and remembered better than abstract ones (concreteness effect, Schwanenflugel et al, 1988, but see counterevidence by Kousta et al, 2011, and no evidence by Barca et al, 2002), and in feature generation tasks they typically elicit more social aspects of situations and more introspective features (Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005). As to their neural underpinnings, abstract concept’s processing engages more left-lateralized brain areas like the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left middle temporal lobe (see meta-analysis by Wang et al, 2010) and knowledge on abstract concepts is impaired in syndromes such as deep dyslexia and semantic dementia (Shallice and Cooper, 2013).
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