ArticleFrontiers in psychology2011
Manipulating objects and telling words: a study on concrete and abstract words acquisition.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Action channel switching costs in the comprehension of concrete and abstract mandarin verbs.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The elicitation of affordance depends on conceptual attributes: evidence from a virtual reality study.Experimental brain research · 2023Article
- Multi-dimensional sensorimotor grounding of concrete and abstract categories.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Concepts, abstractness and inner speech.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Rethinking the role of language in embodied cognition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- How does abstract and concrete garbage classification signage influence waste sorting behavior?PeerJ · 2023Article
- Words have a weight: language as a source of inner grounding and flexibility in abstract concepts.Psychological research · 2022Article
- From Affordances to Abstract Words: The Flexibility of Sensorimotor Grounding.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- Contextual Acquisition of Concrete and Abstract Words: Behavioural and Electrophysiological Evidence.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Inferior parietal lobule is sensitive to different semantic similarity relations for concrete and abstract words.Psychophysiology · 2021Article
- The Effects of Heart Rate Monitoring on Ratings of Perceived Exertion and Attention Allocation in Individuals of Varying Fitness Levels.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2021Article
- Learning Actions From Natural Language Instructions Using an ON-World Embodied Cognitive Architecture.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2021Article
- Sociality to Reach Objects and to Catch Meaning.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Abstract concepts, language and sociality: from acquisition to inner speech.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- The Effect of Training-Induced Visual Imageability on Electrophysiological Correlates of Novel Word Processing.Biomedicines · 2018Article
- A new statistical model for analyzing rating scale data pertaining to word meaning.Psychological research · 2018Article
- Article
- The Differential Contributions of Conceptual Representation Format and Language Structure to Levels of Semantic Abstraction Capacity.Neuropsychology review · 2017Review
- Defining a Conceptual Topography of Word Concreteness: Clustering Properties of Emotion, Sensation, and Magnitude among 750 English Words.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
- Pacifier Overuse and Conceptual Relations of Abstract and Emotional Concepts.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Four experiments (E1-E2-E3-E4) investigated whether different acquisition modalities lead to the emergence of differences typically found between concrete and abstract words, as argued by the words as tools (WAT) proposal. To mimic the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts, participants either manipulated novel objects or observed groups of objects interacting in novel ways (Training 1). In TEST 1 participants decided whether two elements belonged to the same category. Later they read the category labels (Training 2); labels could be accompanied by an explanation of their meaning. Then participants observed previously seen exemplars and other elements, and were asked which of them could be named with a given label (TEST 2). Across the experiments, it was more difficult to form abstract than concrete categories (TEST 1); even when adding labels, abstract words remained more difficult than concrete words (TEST 2). TEST 3 differed across the experiments. In E1 participants performed a feature production task. Crucially, the associations produced with the novel words reflected the pattern evoked by existing concrete and abstract words, as the first evoked more perceptual properties. In E2-E3-E4, TEST 3 consisted of a color verification task with manual/verbal (keyboard-microphone) responses. Results showed the microphone use to have an advantage over keyboard use for abstract words, especially in the explanation condition. This supports WAT: due to their acquisition modality, concrete words evoke more manual information; abstract words elicit more verbal information. This advantage was not present when linguistic information contrasted with perceptual one. Implications for theories and computational models of language grounding are discussed.
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