scholarly journals Abstract, emotional and concrete concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Roberto Nicoletti ◽  
Anna M Borghi
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Emotional Words ◽  
Processing Level ◽  
Concreteness Effect ◽  
Abstract Words ◽  
Concrete Concepts ◽  
Emotional Concepts

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.

scholarly journals Abstract, emotional and concrete concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Roberto Nicoletti ◽  
Anna M Borghi
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Emotional Words ◽  
Processing Level ◽  
Concreteness Effect ◽  
Abstract Words ◽  
Concrete Concepts ◽  
Emotional Concepts

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.

scholarly journals Abstract, emotional and concrete concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors

PeerJ ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e5987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Mariagrazia Benassi ◽  
Roberto Nicoletti ◽  
Anna M. Borghi
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Emotional Words ◽  
Processing Level ◽  
Concreteness Effect ◽  
Abstract Words ◽  
Concrete Concepts ◽  
Emotional Concepts

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.

scholarly journals Abstract, emotional and concrete concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Luisa Lugli ◽  
Roberto Nicoletti ◽  
Anna M Borghi
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Emotional Words ◽  
Processing Level ◽  
Concreteness Effect ◽  
Abstract Words ◽  
Concrete Concepts ◽  
Emotional Concepts

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.

Effects of Context on Processing Emotionally Neutral Abstract and Concrete Concepts

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (7) ◽  
pp. 1191-1200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liusheng Wang ◽  
Hongmei Qiu ◽  
Jianjun Yin
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Decision Task ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Context Condition ◽  
Word Context ◽  
Concrete Concepts ◽  
Concrete Words

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.

scholarly journals Emotion and concreteness effects when learning novel concepts in the native language

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-191
Author(s):  
Marc Guasch ◽  
Pilar Ferré
Keyword(s):  
Native Language ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Intentional Learning ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Abstract Words ◽  
Concrete Concepts ◽  
Concrete Words ◽  
Better Than

Abstract The aim of the present study was to test the proposal of Kousta et al. (2011), according to which abstract words are more affectively loaded than concrete words. To this end, we focused on the acquisition of novel concepts by means of an intentional learning experiment in which participants had to learn a set of 40 novel concepts in Spanish (definitions) associated with novel word forms (pseudowords). Concreteness (concrete vs. abstract concepts) and emotionality (neutral vs. negative concepts) were orthogonally manipulated. Acquisition was assessed through a recognition task in which participants were asked to match the novel word forms with their definitions. Results showed that concrete concepts were acquired better than abstract concepts. Importantly, the concreteness advantage disappeared when the content of the concept was negative. Hence, emotional (negative) content facilitated the acquisition of abstract concepts, but not of concrete concepts, giving support to the proposal of Kousta et al. (2011).

EXPRESS: Articulatory suppression delays processing of abstract words: the role of inner speech

2021 ◽  
pp. 174702182110536
Author(s):  
Chiara Fini ◽  
Gian Daniele Zannino ◽  
Matteo Orsoni ◽  
Giovanni Augusto Carlesimo ◽  
Mariagrazia Benassi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Articulatory Suppression ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Inner Speech ◽  
Dominant Hand ◽  
Conceptual Representation ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Single Object ◽  
Abstract Words ◽  
Concrete Concepts

Compared to concrete concepts, like “book”, abstract concepts expressed by words like “justice” are more detached from sensorial experiences, even though they are also grounded in sensorial modalities. Abstract concepts lack a single object as referent and are characterized by higher variability both within and across participants. According to the Word as Social Tool (WAT) proposal, owing to their complexity, abstract concepts need to be processed with the help of inner language. Inner language can namely help participants to re-explain to themselves the meaning of the word, to keep information active in working memory, and to prepare themselves to ask information from more competent people. While previous studies have demonstrated that the mouth is involved during abstract concepts’ processing, both the functional role and the mechanisms underlying this involvement still need to be clarified. We report an experiment in which participants were required to evaluate whether 78 words were abstract or concrete by pressing two different pedals. During the judgment task, they were submitted, in different blocks, to a baseline, an articulatory suppression, and a manipulation condition. In the last two conditions, they had to repeat a syllable continually and to manipulate a softball with their dominant hand. Results showed that articulatory suppression slowed down the processing of abstract more than that of concrete words. Overall results confirm the WAT proposal’s hypothesis that abstract concepts processing involves the mouth motor system and specifically inner speech. We discuss the implications for current theories of conceptual representation.

scholarly journals The role of emotional valence in learning novel abstract concepts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Vigliocco ◽  
Marta Ponari ◽  
Courtenay Norbury
Keyword(s):  
Teaching Strategy ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Emotional Words ◽  
Abstract Words ◽  
Better Than

A recent study by Ponari et al. (2017), showed that emotional valence (i.e., whether a word evokes positive, negative or no affect) predicts age-of-acquisition ratings, and that up to the age of 8-9, children know abstract emotional words better than neutral ones. On the basis of these findings, emotional valence has been argued to provide a bootstrapping mechanism for the acquisition of abstract concepts. However, no previous work has directly assessed whether words’ valence, or valence of the context in which words are used, facilitates learning of unknown abstract words. Here, we investigate whether valence supports acquisition of novel abstract concepts. Seven to 10 years old children were taught novel abstract words and concepts (words typically learnt at an older age and that children did not know); words were either valenced (positive or negative) or neutral. We also manipulated the context in which words were presented: for one group of children, the teaching strategy emphasised emotional information; for the other, it emphasised encyclopaedic, non-emotional information. Abstract words with emotional valence were learnt better than neutral abstract words by children up to the age of 8-9, replicating previous findings; no effect of teaching strategy was found. These results indicate that emotional valence supports abstract concepts acquisition, and further suggest that it is the valence information intrinsic to the word’s meaning to have a role, rather than the valence of the context in which the word is learnt.

scholarly journals Visual Recognition of Graphic Variants of Amharic Letters: Psycholinguistic Experiments

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Feda Negesse ◽  
Derib Ado
Keyword(s):  
Reaction Time ◽  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Visual Recognition ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Single Letter ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Clear Pattern ◽  
Recognition Time ◽  
Frequency Counts ◽  
Psychological Experiments

One of the problems of Amharic orthography is a lack of consistency where the four Amharic sounds (/h/, /ʔ/, /s/ and /s’/) are mapped onto more than a single letter. The objective of these psychological experiments was to investigate the visual recognition of the graphic variants of the letters, both in isolation and within words. The experiments involved computation of the frequency counts of the letters in the Ten Ten Corpus for Amharic and the result revealed that there is a clear pattern of preference for the letters: the letters representing /h/ had the pattern , the letters representing /ʔ/ had the pattern , the letters representing /s/ had the pattern , and the letters representing /s’/ had the pattern in descending order of frequency. Similarly, the experiments indicated that frequency counts are significantly related to visual recognition of a letter, with the more frequent letters recognized faster with fewer errors. It was also observed that the target letters were recognized with a shorter reaction time when they were paired with themselves, but the recognition time was longer when they occurred with their graphic variants. Moreover, significantly higher percentage of errors were made when the target letters were matched with their graphic variants or their distractors in the alphabet recognition task. Similar patterns were also observed in the lexical decision task when the target letters were presented in words and pseudo-words. More rigorous psycholinguistic experiments, which will involve a large number of participants, are recommended to validate the results of the current experiments.

scholarly journals Incorporating Concreteness in Multi-Modal Language Models with Curriculum Learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 8241
Author(s):  
Erhan Sezerer ◽  
Selma Tekir
Keyword(s):  
Visual Information ◽  
Language Modeling ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Modal Language ◽  
Training Approach ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Abstract Words ◽  
Concrete Concepts ◽  
Modeling Representation

Over the last few years, there has been an increase in the studies that consider experiential (visual) information by building multi-modal language models and representations. It is shown by several studies that language acquisition in humans starts with learning concrete concepts through images and then continues with learning abstract ideas through the text. In this work, the curriculum learning method is used to teach the model concrete/abstract concepts through images and their corresponding captions to accomplish multi-modal language modeling/representation. We use the BERT and Resnet-152 models on each modality and combine them using attentive pooling to perform pre-training on the newly constructed dataset, which is collected from the Wikimedia Commons based on concrete/abstract words. To show the performance of the proposed model, downstream tasks and ablation studies are performed. The contribution of this work is two-fold: A new dataset is constructed from Wikimedia Commons based on concrete/abstract words, and a new multi-modal pre-training approach based on curriculum learning is proposed. The results show that the proposed multi-modal pre-training approach contributes to the success of the model.

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