Abstract
An essential aspect of human cognition is supported by a rich reservoir of abstract concepts without tangible external referents (e.g., “honor”, “relationship”, “direction”). While decades of research showed that the neural organization of conceptual knowledge referring to concrete words respects domains of evolutionary salience and sensorimotor attributes, the organization principles of abstract word meanings are poorly understood. Here, we provide neuropsychological evidence for a domain (sociality) and attribute (emotion) structure in abstract word processing. Testing 34 brain-damaged patients on a word-semantic judgment task, we observed double dissociations between social and nonsocial words and a single dissociation of sparing of emotional (relative to non-emotional) words. The lesion profiles of patients with specific dissociations suggest potential neural correlates positively or negatively associated with each dimension. These results unravel a general domain-attribute architecture of word meanings and highlight the roles of the social domain and the emotional attribute in the non-object semantic space.
Highlights
An essential aspect of human cognition is supported by a rich reservoir of abstract concepts without tangible external referents (e.g., “honor”, “relationship”, “direction”)
After the seminal neuropsychological work reporting category-specific semantic deficits[7,8], mounting neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence has revealed that object semantics is organized at least by domains of evolutionary salience and attributes that associate with certain sensory/motor modalities in the brain, despite debates about the postulation of a domain-general semantic integration hub in anterior temporal lobe[13,14]
Given the lack of specific external referents, one hypothesis is that abstract word meanings are represented in fundamentally different ways from concrete words and rely on associations possibly derived from language[1,15,16]
Summary
An essential aspect of human cognition is supported by a rich reservoir of abstract concepts without tangible external referents (e.g., “honor”, “relationship”, “direction”). The lesion profiles of patients with specific dissociations suggest potential neural correlates positively or negatively associated with each dimension These results unravel a general domain-attribute architecture of word meanings and highlight the roles of the social domain and the emotional attribute in the non-object semantic space. One of the most productive approaches to carve the organization structure of human cognition is through the single-case studies in cognitive neuropsychology: careful documentation of functional dissociation and association patterns in individual brain-damaged patients This method has been highly fruitful in revealing the domain and attribute organization of the semantic space of concrete objects[9,10,11]. The patients’ brain lesions were of diverse aetiologies and anatomical locations, which we documented whenever available to infer the potential neural correlates of abstract word comprehension
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