Abstract
On the basis of previous studies revealing a processing advantage of concrete words over abstract words, the current study aimed to further explore the influence of concreteness on the integration of novel words into semantic memory with the event related potential (ERP) technique. In the experiment during the learning phase participants read two-sentence contexts and inferred the meaning of novel words. The novel words were two-character non-words in Chinese language. Their meaning was either a concrete or abstract known concept which could be inferred from the contexts. During the testing phase participants performed a lexical decision task in which the learned novel words served as primes for either their corresponding concepts, semantically related or unrelated targets. For the concrete novel words, the semantically related words belonged to the same semantic categories with their corresponding concepts. For the abstract novel words, the semantically related words were synonyms of their corresponding concepts. The unrelated targets were real words which were concrete or abstract for the concrete or abstract novel words respectively. The ERP results showed that the corresponding concepts and the semantically related words elicited smaller N400s than the unrelated words. The N400 effect was not modulated by the concreteness of the concepts. In addition, the concrete corresponding concepts elicited a smaller late positive component (LPC) than the concrete unrelated words. This LPC effect was absent for the abstract words. The results indicate that although both concrete and abstract novel words can be acquired and linked to their related words in the semantic network after a short learning phase, the concrete novel words are learned better. Our findings support the (extended) dual coding theory and broaden our understanding of adult word learning and changes in concept organization.
Highlights
A processing advantage of concrete concepts over abstract concepts, namely a concreteness effect, is reported in a variety of tasks including lexical decision, free recall, recognition, as well as paired associate learning
The results showed that the target words differed in concreteness, with the concrete words being more concrete than the abstract words
The current study aimed to examine whether and how the concreteness of concepts influences the learning of novel words and their associations with known words in semantic memory
Summary
A processing advantage of concrete concepts over abstract concepts, namely a concreteness effect, is reported in a variety of tasks including lexical decision, free recall, recognition, as well as paired associate learning (for reviews, see Paivio, 1991; Schwanenflugel et al, 1992). According to the dual coding theory, there is a verbalbased system and an imagery-based system associated with concepts in semantic memory. The former is responsible for the representation and processing of linguistic information, and the latter for nonverbal information. When a concrete word is processed, the verbal and nonverbal systems function independently and are interconnected, which results in an additive effect, thereby yielding a processing advantage for concrete words over abstract words
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