Lexical access for concrete and abstract words.

Three experiments with 48 undergraduates compared the speed and accuracy of lexical decisions for concrete and abstract nouns. Results of Exp I, in which separate groups of Ss judged each word type, and of Exp II, in which all Ss judged mixed blocks of both word types, indicate that there was a small speed advantage for concrete nouns in lexical decision. To observe transfer effects from one word type to the other, all Ss in Exp III made judgments within blocked presentations of each word type. Findings show that when blocks of abstract words followed blocks of concrete words, judgments for the abstract words were significantly longer than those for concrete words. When concrete blocks followed abstract blocks, however, there was no difference in response time for the 2 word types. It is concluded that the effect of concreteness in lexical decision appears to be critically sensitive to order of presentation. Implications for models of common vs dual representation in lexical memory are discussed. (56 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comprehension of concrete and abstract words in semantic dementia.

The vast majority of brain-injured patients with semantic impairment have better comprehension of concrete than abstract words. In contrast, several patients with semantic dementia (SD), who show circumscribed atrophy of the anterior temporal lobes bilaterally, have been reported to show reverse imageability effects, that is, relative preservation of abstract knowledge. Although these reports largely concern individual patients, some researchers have recently proposed that superior comprehension of abstract concepts is a characteristic feature of SD. This would imply that the anterior temporal lobes are particularly crucial for processing sensory aspects of semantic knowledge, which are associated with concrete not abstract concepts. However, functional neuroimaging studies of healthy participants do not unequivocally predict reverse imageability effects in SD because the temporal poles sometimes show greater activation for more abstract concepts. The authors examined a case-series of 11 SD patients on a synonym judgment test that orthogonally varied the frequency and imageability of the items. All patients had higher success rates for more imageable as well as more frequent words, suggesting that (1) the anterior temporal lobes underpin semantic knowledge for both concrete and abstract concepts, (2) more imageable items—perhaps because of their richer multimodal representations—are typically more robust in the face of global semantic degradation and (3) reverse imageability effects are not a characteristic feature of SD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differential effects of normal aging on recollection of concrete and abstract words.

Verbal memory is known to be affected by word features. Concrete words are remembered better than abstract words (concreteness effect), presumably due to the concurrent activation of image-based and/or semantic associations. Vivid remembering during recognition (recollection) has been linked to the hippocampus and is thought to be more affected by healthy aging than familiarity-based recognition. Recent evidence also implicated the hippocampus in the processing of concrete words. Based on these observations, we hypothesized age-related changes in recollection to affect concrete words more than abstract words. This prediction was tested in a cross-sectional design with three consecutive age groups (mean ages 21 years, 42 years, and 61 years). Changes in recollection, but not familiarity, across ages were significantly modulated by word concreteness. Recollection of concrete words showed a steady decline across age, while recollection of abstract words decreased only from young to middle age, leading to a reduced concreteness effect in the oldest group. These findings are consistent with the idea that changes in hippocampally mediated recollective processes during aging affect concrete words more than abstract words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Electrophysiologic dissociations in memory encoding of abstract and concrete words

This study examined memory encoding of auditorily presented abstract and concrete nouns. 22 subjects performed various blocks of a free recall memory task in which lists of 22 either abstract or concrete words had to be memorized. Consistent with a large variety of memory studies, recall performance was better for concrete than for abstract words. When the event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded during study were selectively averaged for those words that were subsequently recalled and those subsequently not recalled, the ERPs were more positive going for words that were subsequently recalled. These Dm effects (Difference due to memory) started around 500 ms post-stimulus and differed in timing and scalp topography for both types of words: For abstract words, they were present in an early (i.e., 600 to 1100 ms) time interval at parieto-occipital electrodes only. In contrast, for concrete words, Dm effects were obtained with a broad topographic distribution in the 600 to 1000 ms time range and were also present in a late time interval (1100 to 1600 ms) at fronto-central recording sites. The topographical dissociations of the Dm effects in the early time interval are taken to reflect the larger distinctiveness of concrete words during encoding, whereas the late effects presumably play a functional role in elaborative processing of concrete words. The results do not agree with models of word concreteness that propose separate processing systems for the two types of words, and rather support those models that propose quantitative differences in the processing of abstract and concrete words.     

Concreteness-dependent associative priming: Separate lexical organization for concrete and abstract words.

Four experiments used associated, unrelated, and neutral ({blank}–word) pairs that varied on prime and target concreteness. In Experiment 1, associated targets were named faster than neutral targets when primes and targets were homogeneous for concreteness (i.e., concrete–concrete or abstract–abstract), but not when they were heterogeneous (i.e., concrete–abstract or abstract–concrete). Experiments 2 and 3, using lexical decision, showed priming for all pairs irrespective of prime and target concreteness. In Experiment 4, the prime was presented for 16.7 ms, followed immediately by a 168-ms random letter mask. Lexical decision times showed priming similar to that in Experiment 1. If priming in Experiments 1 and 4 reflected lexical processes, whereas priming in Experiments 2 and 3 entailed postlexical processes, then lexical processes may be functionally distinct for concrete versus abstract words. These findings are more consistent with dual-coding than common-coding explanations of concreteness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Partial knowledge of abstract words in patients with cortical degenerative conditions.

Partial knowledge is a common but rarely studied consequence of damage to conceptual representations and is characterized by the retained ability to retrieve crude, superordinate information but not specific, detailed information about a conceptual entity. Previous studies have described partial knowledge for concrete items particularly following semantic dementia (SD). The present study was designed to investigate the occurrence of partial knowledge effects in the conceptual domain of abstract words. A novel 3-level synonym comprehension test was administered to 9 patients with SD, 20 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 40 healthy control subjects. All subject groups showed weaker performance on tasks requiring a fine specification of word meaning compared with those for which a broad sense of meaning or valence was necessary. However, this gradient of partial knowledge was significantly greater for SD and AD subjects than for controls. These results demonstrate that partial knowledge is a general property of a degraded knowledge base and is not restricted to the concrete word domain. It constitutes a normal phenomenon that is exacerbated in the context of neurodegenerative disease. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differences in tachistoscopic recognition between abstract and concrete words as a function of visual half-field and frequency

This experiment demonstrated that the greater right visual half-field (VHF) superiority for abstract words than for concrete words reported in two previous studies generalized to an independent, larger sample of abstract and concrete nouns. In addition, degree of concreteness was found to be positively related to overall recognition, with high concrete words averaging 38% correct, moderate concrete words averaging 30% correct, and abstract words averaging 20% correct. Analyses of ratio scores indicated that high frequency abstract words showed a significantly larger right VHF asymmetry than high frequency moderately concrete words or high frequency high concrete words. Groups of abstract, moderately concrete and high concrete words were also matched on right VHF recognition, to evaluate whether differences in VHF asymmetry were secondary to the differences in overall recognition. A significant interaction between VHF and word class was found, again indicating larger right VHF superiority for the abstract words. The data are consistent with previous suggestions that some left VHF concrete words are recongized by the right hemisphere.     

The representation of abstract words: Why emotion matters.

Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this article we first address the adequacy of the 2 dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. We find that neither proposal can account for experimental findings and that this is, at least partly, because abstract words are considered to be unrelated to experiential information in both of these accounts. We then address a particular type of experiential information, emotional content, and demonstrate that it plays a crucial role in the processing and representation of abstract concepts: Statistically, abstract words are more emotionally valenced than are concrete words, and this accounts for a residual latency advantage for abstract words, when variables such as imageability (a construct derived from dual coding theory) and rated context availability are held constant. We conclude with a discussion of our novel hypothesis for embodied abstract semantics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context and the recallability of concrete and abstract sentences.

Examined the influence of contextual information on the recall of abstract and concrete sentences in 3 experiments, using 216 undergraduates. In Exp I, concrete and abstract target sentences were presented in either a coherent paragraph context or a random paragraph context. In the random context, Ss recalled more concrete target sentences than abstract ones, but there was no difference between the 2 groups when the sentences were presented in a coherent context. Exp II extended this finding by adding a moderately coherent context that used many of the same nouns as the coherent paragraph, but it was not as thematically coherent. Exp II replicated the results of Exp I and found that the moderately coherent context provided intermediate facilitation for the recall of abstract sentences relative to the random context and the coherent context; context structure had no effect on the recall of concrete sentences. In Exp III, the target sentences were abstract and the concreteness of the context was varied. Abstract context sentences were recalled as well as concrete context sentences if the contexts formed a coherent paragraph; if the context was a randomly ordered list of sentences, concrete context sentences were recalled better than abstract context sentences. Results were interpreted in terms of the differential availability of contextual information for abstract and concrete materials and support the context availability model. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reversal and extradimensional shifts in abstract and concrete schizophrenics.

72 concrete schizophrenics, defined in terms of conceptual sorting difficulties, were trained under 1 of 3 discrimination-learning conditions: reversal (R) shift, extradimensional (ED) shift, or control. 72 abstract schizophrenics were similarly divided, 1/2 of the Ss in each condition received verbal reinforcement, and 1/2 received candy reinforcement. Results indicated that concrete Ss required significantly more trials to learn the shift concepts than abstract Ss. Both R and ED shifts produced negative transfer relative to control conditions, but there was no significant difference between the 2 shift conditions. No differential effect was attributable to the different reinforcers. Results were discussed in terms of 2-stage discrimination-learning models and Goldstein's theory of schizophrenic concreteness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Event-related electric microstates of the brain differ between words with visual and abstract meaning

The present study shows that different neural activity during mental imagery and abstract mentation can be assigned to well-defined steps of the brain's information-processing. During randomized visual presentation of single, imagery-type and abstract-type words, 27 channel event-related potential (ERP) field maps were obtained from 25 subjects (sequence-divided into a first and second group for statistics). The brain field map series showed a sequence of typical map configurations that were quasi-stable for brief time periods (microstates). The microstates were concatenated by rapid map changes. As different map configurations must result from different spatial patterns of neural activity, each microstate represents different active neural networks. Accordingly, microstates are assumed to correspond to discrete steps of information-processing. Comparing microstate topographies (using centroids) between imagery- and abstract-type words, significantly different microstates were found in both subject groups at 286-354 ms where imagery-type words were more right-lateralized than abstract-type words, and at 550-606 ms and 606-666 ms where anterior-posterior differences occurred. We conclude that language-processing consists of several, well-defined steps and that the brain-states incorporating those steps are altered by the stimuli's capacities to generate mental imagery or abstract mentation in a state-dependent manner.     

On detecting words embedded in a stream of auditory letters.

Presented 40 undergraduates with a stream of auditory letters in which some of the letters formed words. Ss were or were not given cues for the start of the words. It was found that (a) Ss required an indication of which letters started words. If certain letters formed part of more than 1 word, S detected the word for which a cue was provided but more often than not failed to detect the other word. When cues were provided on both words, the probability of getting both depended on the extent to which the 2 words "overlapped" in common letters. Results are discussed in the light of current work on serial processing. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some consequences of violating selection restrictions in concrete and abstract sentences.

Conducted 3 experiments with a total of 280 undergraduates in which content word constituents were reassigned arbitrarily to different sentences in lists of simple sentences. Original and substituted sentences were rated for imagery, comprehensibility, and sensibleness and, in Exps II and III, were tested also for incidental and intentional recall. Substitutions produced a greater ratings decrement for concrete than for abstract sentences, reversing in some cases a comprehensibility and sensibleness superiority found for the original concrete sentences. This finding supports the hypothesis that greater selection restrictions are associated with concrete than with abstract concepts. Consistent with the notion that imaginal coding is relatively insensitive to semantic constraint violations, smaller rating decrements were produced by substitutions under an imaginal coding set than under either a comprehension or a sensibleness set. Differences in constraints fail to account for concrete/abstract differences in recall as indicated by the finding of an unqualified recall superiority for concrete material under all conditions of substitution. (French summary) (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Associative learning of abstract and concrete nouns and their subject-drawn pictorial representations.

Conducted 2 experiments to examine undergraduates' associative learning and pictorial representations of 48 concrete and 48 abstract noun pairs. In Exp. I, 24 Ss drew their own pictures of each noun. In Exp. II, another 24 Ss chose S-drawings that best represented their subjective meaning of the word referents. These Ss also received pretraining in labelling the S-drawings. Results from both experiments show that recall of noun pairs was superior to recall of S-drawn picture pairs. These findings conflict with the literature on picture and word paired-associate learning. In addition, concreteness of items facilitated recall. In Exp. I, concrete S-drawings were significantly better retrieval cues than abstract S-drawings. Results are discussed in terms of Pavio's theory of verbal and imagery processes of memory. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concrete words are easier to recall than abstract words: Evidence for a semantic contribution to short-term serial recall.

Immediate serial recall and maximal speech rate were assessed for concrete and abstract words differing in length. Experiment 1 showed large advantages for spoken recall of concrete words that were independent of speech rate. Experiment 2 showed an equivalent effect with written, rather than spoken, recall. Experiment 3 showed that the concreteness effect was still present when recall was backward rather than forward. In all 3 experiments, concrete words enjoyed an advantage that was roughly constant across all serial positions (with the possible exception of the 1st and last items). Experiment 4 used a matching-span procedure and showed that when there was no requirement for linguistic output, the effect of concreteness (but not the effect of word length) was eliminated. It is argued that semantic coding exerts powerful effects in verbal short-term memory tasks that have generally been underestimated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reducing cognitive load by mixing auditory and visual presentation modes.

This article reports findings on the use of a partly auditory and partly visual mode of presentation for geometry worked examples. The logic was based on the split-attention effect and the effect of presentation modality on working memory. The split-attention effect occurs when students must split their attention between multiple sources of information, which results in a heavy cognitive load. Presentation-modality effects suggest that working memory has partially independent processors for handling visual and auditory material. Effective working memory may be increased by presenting material in a mixed rather than a unitary mode. If so, the negative consequences of split attention in geometry might be ameliorated by presenting geometry statements in auditory, rather than visual, form. The results of 6 experiments supported this hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Detection of Kanji words in a rapid serial visual presentation task.

In 3 experiments, lists of 12 Kanji words were rapidly presented in the same position, and participants reported a red target word embedded in green distractor words. Two lists were used: same and different category. A tendency toward category priming was found at longer durations. Frequency of target localization indicated that participants familiar with Kanji had a greater tendency to report the word immediately preceding the target. These pretarget intrusion errors dominated the posttarget intrusion errors, when the luminance of red and green stimuli were equated (Experiment 2), and when the response was recall (Experiments 1 and 2) or recognition (Experiment 3). In contrast, participants unfamiliar with Kanji made posttarget intrusion errors as frequently as pretarget intrusion errors (Experiment 3), suggesting that knowledge of Kanji influences the integration of color and form codes in visual information processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonemic segmentation skill and beginning reading.

Investigated the relation of phonological awareness to learning to read in 63 1st-grade children (mean age 6 yrs 2 mo), who were administered tests of verbal intelligence, phonemic segmentation ability, and reading achievement. Verbal intelligence was measured using the PPVT—Form A. Results indicate that the relation of nondigraph word segmentation to reading achievement is greater than that of digraph word segmentation to reading achievement and that this relation is nonlinear. Consistent with the claim of a causal connection between phonological awareness and reading acquisition, a contingency analysis of the data revealed that phonemic segmentation ability is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for learning to read. The data were also subjected to a path analysis, which indicated that phonological awareness affects reading comprehension indirectly through phonological recoding and that the development of phonological awareness is not greatly affected by method of instruction. Implications of these findings for educational practice are briefly indicated. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in learning: Visual versus auditory presentation.

Investigated the possible interaction of individual differences in learning with mode of presentation. Ss were college students; data analyses were replicated by conducting separate analyses for 2 groups of 77 and 83 Ss, respectively. Each S learned 4 test lists of 20 words each, 2 under auditory and 2 under visual presentation. The main analyses indicated that individual differences in learning were reliable and that individual differences were just as predictable across as within modalities. A complementary analysis showed that Ss could not be reliably classified in terms of auditory–visual preference scores. The findings give no support to the contention that Ss can be classified as auditory learners or visual learners. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)