Abstract

Across disciplines, researchers are eager to gain insight into empirical features of abstract vs. concrete concepts. In this work, we provide a detailed characterisation of the distributional nature of abstract and concrete words across 16,620 English nouns, verbs and adjectives. Specifically, we investigate the following questions: (1) What is the distribution of concreteness in the contexts of concrete and abstract target words? (2) What are the differences between concrete and abstract words in terms of contextual semantic diversity? (3) How does the entropy of concrete and abstract word contexts differ? Overall, our studies show consistent differences in the distributional representation of concrete and abstract words, thus challenging existing theories of cognition and providing a more fine-grained description of their nature.

Highlights

  • The complete understanding of the cognitive mechanisms behind the processing of concrete and abstract meanings represents a key and still open question in cognitive science (Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005)

  • Hill et al (2014) quantitatively analysed the distinction between concrete and abstract words in a large corpus. They showed that abstract words occur within a broad range of context words while concrete words occur within a smaller set of context words

  • These computational findings are fully in line with the Context Availability Theory: the processing time of concrete words is generally shorter than the processing time of abstract words, as abstract words are attached to a broad range of loosely associated words

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Summary

Introduction

The complete understanding of the cognitive mechanisms behind the processing of concrete and abstract meanings represents a key and still open question in cognitive science (Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005). Hoffman et al (2013) and Hoffman and Woollams (2015) analysed the concrete vs abstract dichotomy in terms of their semantic diversity, demonstrating that concrete words occur within highly similar contexts while abstract words occur in a broad range of less associated contexts (i.e., exhibiting high semantic diversity). These computational findings are fully in line with the Context Availability Theory: the processing time of concrete words is generally shorter than the processing time of abstract words, as abstract words are attached to a broad range of loosely associated words

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