D'Aversa et al., (2021). Categorization of Chinese words_preprint

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Mayo D'Aversa ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Anna M. Borghi ◽  
Laura Barca

This study extends the examination of the difference between abstract concepts to the Chinese language and its peculiar characteristics in word formation, where components with different semantic content might be aggregated within a word. Chinese students categorized abstract and concrete words by moving the computer mouse towards the selected choice. Stimuli with a ‘semantically simple structure’ (i.e., abstract-abstract/concrete-concrete) were compared with those with a ‘mixed structure’ (i.e., abstract-concrete/concrete-abstract) to test for an effect of the conceptual content of the stimulus’s components on its overall processing. Response time and kinematic parameters revealed that: a) the semantic content of the components affected the processing of abstract but not concrete concepts, b) concepts differed when they have a semantically mixed structure, not a simple one. We extend the concreteness effect also to logographic script and provide evidence that the presence of concrete component within an abstract concept is elaborated and affects its processing.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Roberto Nicoletti ◽  
Anna M Borghi

According to embodied and grounded theories concepts are grounded in sensorimotor systems. The majority of evidence supporting these views concerns concepts referring to objects or actions, while evidence on abstract concepts is more scarce. Explaining how abstract concepts, as “freedom”, are represented, would however be pivotal for grounded theories. According to some recent proposals, abstract concepts are grounded evoking both sensorimotor and linguistic experience, thus activating the mouth motor system more than concrete concepts. Two experiments are reported, aimed at verifying whether abstract, concrete and emotional words activate the mouth and hand effectors. In both experiments participants performed first a lexical decision, then a recognition task. In Experiment 1 participants responded by pressing a button either with the mouth or with the hand, in Experiment 2 responses were given with the foot, while a button held either in the mouth or in the hand was used to respond to catch-trials. Abstract words were slower to process in both tasks (concreteness effect). Across the tasks and experiments, emotional concepts had instead a fluctuating pattern, different from those of both concrete and abstract concepts, suggesting that they cannot be considered as a subset of abstract concepts. The interaction between kind of concept (abstract, concrete and emotional) and effector (mouth, hand) was not significant in the lexical decision task, likely because it emerged only with tasks implying a deeper processing level. It reached significance, instead, in the accuracy analyses of the recognition tasks. In both experiments abstract concepts yielded less errors in the mouth than in the hand condition, supporting our main prediction. Emotional concepts had instead a more variable pattern. Overall, our findings indicate that different kinds of concepts differently activate the mouth and hand effectors, but they also suggests that concepts activate effectors in a flexible and task-dependent way.



2018 ◽  
Vol 373 (1752) ◽  
pp. 20170143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Connell ◽  
Dermot Lynott ◽  
Briony Banks

Conceptual representations are perceptually grounded, but when investigating which perceptual modalities are involved, researchers have typically restricted their consideration to vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. However, there is another major modality of perceptual information that is distinct from these traditional five senses; that is, interoception, or sensations inside the body. In this paper, we use megastudy data (modality-specific ratings of perceptual strength for over 32 000 words) to explore how interoceptive information contributes to the perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts. We report how interoceptive strength captures a distinct form of perceptual experience across the abstract–concrete spectrum, but is markedly more important to abstract concepts (e.g. hungry , serenity ) than to concrete concepts (e.g. capacity , rainy ). In particular, interoception dominates emotion concepts, especially negative emotions relating to fear and sadness , moreso than other concepts of equivalent abstractness and valence. Finally, we examine whether interoceptive strength represents valuable information in conceptual content by investigating its role in concreteness effects in word recognition, and find that it enhances semantic facilitation over and above the traditional five sensory modalities. Overall, these findings suggest that interoception has comparable status to other modalities in contributing to the perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.



2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 920-935 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine D. Wilson-Mendenhall ◽  
W. Kyle Simmons ◽  
Alex Martin ◽  
Lawrence W. Barsalou

Concepts develop for many aspects of experience, including abstract internal states and abstract social activities that do not refer to concrete entities in the world. The current study assessed the hypothesis that, like concrete concepts, distributed neural patterns of relevant nonlinguistic semantic content represent the meanings of abstract concepts. In a novel neuroimaging paradigm, participants processed two abstract concepts (convince, arithmetic) and two concrete concepts (rolling, red) deeply and repeatedly during a concept–scene matching task that grounded each concept in typical contexts. Using a catch trial design, neural activity associated with each concept word was separated from neural activity associated with subsequent visual scenes to assess activations underlying the detailed semantics of each concept. We predicted that brain regions underlying mentalizing and social cognition (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal sulcus) would become active to represent semantic content central to convince, whereas brain regions underlying numerical cognition (e.g., bilateral intraparietal sulcus) would become active to represent semantic content central to arithmetic. The results supported these predictions, suggesting that the meanings of abstract concepts arise from distributed neural systems that represent concept-specific content.



PeerJ ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e5987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Mariagrazia Benassi ◽  
Roberto Nicoletti ◽  
Anna M. Borghi

According to embodied and grounded theories, concepts are grounded in sensorimotor systems. The majority of evidence supporting these views concerns concepts referring to objects or actions, while evidence on abstract concepts is more scarce. Explaining how abstract concepts such as “freedom” are represented would thus be pivotal for grounded theories. According to some recent proposals, abstract concepts are grounded in both sensorimotor and linguistic experience, thus they activate the mouth motor system more than concrete concepts. Two experiments are reported, aimed at verifying whether abstract, concrete and emotional words activate the mouth and the hand effectors. In both experiments participants performed first a lexical decision, then a recognition task. In Experiment 1 participants responded by pressing a button either with the mouth or with the hand, in Experiment 2 responses were given with the foot, while a button held either in the mouth or in the hand was used to respond to catch-trials. Abstract words were slower to process in both tasks (concreteness effect). Across the tasks and experiments, emotional concepts had instead a fluctuating pattern, different from those of both concrete and abstract concepts, suggesting that they cannot be considered as a subset of abstract concepts. The interaction between type of concept (abstract, concrete and emotional) and effector (mouth, hand) was not significant in the lexical decision task, likely because it emerged only with tasks implying a deeper processing level. It reached significance, instead, in the recognition tasks. In both experiments abstract concepts were facilitated in the mouth condition compared to the hand condition, supporting our main prediction. Emotional concepts instead had a more variable pattern. Overall, our findings indicate that various kinds of concepts differently activate the mouth and hand effectors, but they also suggest that concepts activate effectors in a flexible and task-dependent way.



2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Roberto Nicoletti ◽  
Anna M Borghi

According to embodied and grounded theories concepts are grounded in sensorimotor systems. The majority of evidence supporting these views concerns concepts referring to objects or actions, while evidence on abstract concepts is more scarce. Explaining how abstract concepts, as “freedom”, are represented, would however be pivotal for grounded theories. According to some recent proposals, abstract concepts are grounded evoking both sensorimotor and linguistic experience, thus activating the mouth motor system more than concrete concepts. Two experiments are reported, aimed at verifying whether abstract, concrete and emotional words activate the mouth and hand effectors. In both experiments participants performed first a lexical decision, then a recognition task. In Experiment 1 participants responded by pressing a button either with the mouth or with the hand, in Experiment 2 responses were given with the foot, while a button held either in the mouth or in the hand was used to respond to catch-trials. Abstract words were slower to process in both tasks (concreteness effect). Across the tasks and experiments, emotional concepts had instead a fluctuating pattern, different from those of both concrete and abstract concepts, suggesting that they cannot be considered as a subset of abstract concepts. The interaction between kind of concept (abstract, concrete and emotional) and effector (mouth, hand) was not significant in the lexical decision task, likely because it emerged only with tasks implying a deeper processing level. It reached significance, instead, in the accuracy analyses of the recognition tasks. In both experiments abstract concepts yielded less errors in the mouth than in the hand condition, supporting our main prediction. Emotional concepts had instead a more variable pattern. Overall, our findings indicate that different kinds of concepts differently activate the mouth and hand effectors, but they also suggests that concepts activate effectors in a flexible and task-dependent way.



2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Roberto Nicoletti ◽  
Anna M Borghi

According to embodied and grounded theories concepts are grounded in sensorimotor systems. The majority of evidence supporting these views concerns concepts referring to objects or actions, while evidence on abstract concepts is more scarce. Explaining how abstract concepts, as “freedom”, are represented, would however be pivotal for grounded theories. According to some recent proposals, abstract concepts are grounded evoking both sensorimotor and linguistic experience, thus activating the mouth motor system more than concrete concepts. Two experiments are reported, aimed at verifying whether abstract, concrete and emotional words activate the mouth and hand effectors. In both experiments participants performed first a lexical decision, then a recognition task. In Experiment 1 participants responded by pressing a button either with the mouth or with the hand, in Experiment 2 responses were given with the foot, while a button held either in the mouth or in the hand was used to respond to catch-trials. Abstract words were slower to process in both tasks (concreteness effect). Across the tasks and experiments, emotional concepts had instead a fluctuating pattern, different from those of both concrete and abstract concepts, suggesting that they cannot be considered as a subset of abstract concepts. The interaction between kind of concept (abstract, concrete and emotional) and effector (mouth, hand) was not significant in the lexical decision task, likely because it emerged only with tasks implying a deeper processing level. It reached significance, instead, in the accuracy analyses of the recognition tasks. In both experiments abstract concepts yielded less errors in the mouth than in the hand condition, supporting our main prediction. Emotional concepts had instead a more variable pattern. Overall, our findings indicate that different kinds of concepts differently activate the mouth and hand effectors, but they also suggests that concepts activate effectors in a flexible and task-dependent way.



2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (7) ◽  
pp. 1191-1200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liusheng Wang ◽  
Hongmei Qiu ◽  
Jianjun Yin

The abstractness effect describes the phenomenon of individuals processing abstract concepts faster and more accurately than they process concrete concepts. In this study, we explored the effects of context on how 43 college students processed words, controlling for the emotional valence of the words. The participants performed a lexical decision task in which they were shown individual abstract and concrete words, or abstract and concrete words embedded in sentences. The results showed that in the word-context condition the participants' processing of concrete concepts improved, whereas in the sentence-context condition their processing of abstract concepts improved. These findings support the embodied cognition theory of concept processing.



2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Montefinese ◽  
Erin Michelle Buchanan ◽  
David Vinson

Models of semantic representation predict that automatic priming is determined by associative and co-occurrence relations (i.e., spreading activation accounts), or to similarity in words' semantic features (i.e., featural models). Although, these three factors are correlated in characterizing semantic representation, they seem to tap different aspects of meaning. We designed two lexical decision experiments to dissociate these three different types of meaning similarity. For unmasked primes, we observed priming only due to association strength and not the other two measures; and no evidence for differences in priming for concrete and abstract concepts. For masked primes there was no priming regardless of the semantic relation. These results challenge theoretical accounts of automatic priming. Rather, they are in line with the idea that priming may be due to participants’ controlled strategic processes. These results provide important insight about the nature of priming and how association strength, as determined from word-association norms, relates to the nature of semantic representation.



2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 11-19
Author(s):  
I. V. Ganusenko ◽  

Consideration in the scientific article The question of the relationship of the regulatory terminology used as the official name of the Russian state is due to the problem of the absence of a single scientific approach in determining its semantic content and is dedicated to the 300th anniversary of the proclamation of the name of the state “Russian Empire”. The features of the rulemaking practice on the official consolidation of the name of the state with the simultaneous use of regulatory terms “Russia”, “Russian Empire”, “Empire” and “Russian State”, having an equivalent semantic value in the name of the same state that operated in the specific historical period of its development. Allocated the generals patterns of the applied context of said terminology in regulatory legal acts of various sectoral affiliation. It was concluded that there is no synonymous properties and the difference in the context of the contents of the second half of the XIX century the terms “Russia” and “Russian Empire”, which are used by the domestic legislator, which is used depending on the type and subject of regulated public relations.



LingTera ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Mia Rahmannia ◽  
Pratomo Widodo

Generally, blending can be defined as combining two clipped words. Kvetko in Bednarova defines blending as a word formation process similar to shortening combined with merging two different words. There are many types of blending words both in Indonesian and English context. Therefore, the aim of this research is to analyze the comparison between Indonesian blend words and English blend words in terms of its types, its similarities and differences and also how its formed. In this paper the researcher use descriptive qualitative method as the method of the research. The source of the data is taken from some journal articles that relevant with blend words both in Indonesian and English context. The result showed that Indonesian blend words and English blend words not only have similarities in the forming word, but also have their differences that make them unique to each other. The writer hopes that the reader of this article gets more information about both Indonesian and English blend words based on its types and the similarities and the difference between them.



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