Abstract
It has been widely reported that concrete words have processing advantages over abstract words in terms of speed and efficiency of processing, a phenomenon known as the concreteness effect. However, little is still known about the early time-course of processing concrete and abstract words and whether this concreteness effect can still persist in conditions where attention is not focused on the words presented (automatic processing). This study aimed to shed light on these issues by examining the electrophysiological brain responses to concrete and abstract words. While participants were engaged in a non-linguistic color tracking task presented in the center of the monitor screen, matched Chinese concrete and abstract single-character words appeared within a passive oddball paradigm, out of the focus of attention. In calculating visual Mismatch Negativity (vMMN), Event-related potentials (ERPs) to words of the same semantic category were compared when these words were presented as deviants and standards. Before 320 ms, both abstract and concrete words yielded vMMN with left-lateralized distribution, suggesting similar verbal processing at an initial processing stage. After 320 ms, only concrete words additionally elicited vMMN with a central distribution. Time frequency (TF) analysis of the results also revealed larger theta power increase (200–300 ms) and theta power phase locking (200–450 ms) for concrete than for abstract words. Interestingly, there was more alpha power decrease for abstract than for concrete words from 300 to 450 ms. This may reflect the greater difficulty in processing abstract meaning. Taken together, our ERP and TF results point to the existence of different neural mechanisms underlying non-attentive processing of abstract and concrete words.
Highlights
The linguistic concreteness effect refers to the processing advantage of words representing imaginable, concrete concepts over those representing abstract concepts without sensory referents
The concreteness effect has been of central interest among linguists and psychologists, as its sharp contrast between two semantic categories has been explored as a window onto the nature and structure of semantic representation in the human mind (Dalla Volta et al, 2014)
While for the concrete word deviants appeared to be more negative than standards over a time interval from 300 ms to around 450 ms, there is no such a sign for abstract words
Summary
The linguistic concreteness effect refers to the processing advantage of words representing imaginable, concrete concepts (e.g., apple) over those representing abstract concepts without sensory referents (e.g., skill). The dual coding theory proposes two qualitatively distinct systems of semantic processing, one verbal and the other nonverbal and imagery-based. Both concrete and abstract words share the verbal processing system, concrete words can engage the perceptual, imagery-focused system, which results in processing advantages. The context availability theory argues for a common verbal system for both types of words but that concrete words can activate more associative information, resulting in a processing advantage over abstract words
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