ArticleFrontiers in psychology2016
Grounding Abstractness: Abstract Concepts and the Activation of the Mouth.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Action channel switching costs in the comprehension of concrete and abstract mandarin verbs.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Spatio-temporal activity of brain electrical sources during processing of abstract social concepts.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Abstract concepts and simulated competition.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Multi-dimensional sensorimotor grounding of concrete and abstract categories.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Is motor inhibition involved in the processing of sentential negation? An assessment via the Stop-Signal Task.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Brain Signatures of Embodied Semantics and Language: A Consensus Paper.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Contribution and functional connectivity between cerebrum and cerebellum on sub-lexical and lexical-semantic processing of verbs.PloS one · 2023Article
- Modelling concrete and abstract concepts using brain-constrained deep neural networks.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Is justice grounded? How expertise shapes conceptual representation of institutional concepts.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Words have a weight: language as a source of inner grounding and flexibility in abstract concepts.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Restricting movements of lower face leaves recognition of emotional vocalizations intact but introduces a valence positivity bias.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Neural similarity between mentalizing and live social interaction during the transition to adolescence.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- From Affordances to Abstract Words: The Flexibility of Sensorimotor Grounding.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- Does Embodiment of Verbs Influence Predicate Metaphor Processing in a Second Language? Evidence From Picture Priming.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Sociality to Reach Objects and to Catch Meaning.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Embodied Learning: Why at School the Mind Needs the Body.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Review
- Concrete vs. Abstract Semantics: From Mental Representations to Functional Brain Mapping.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2019Review
- Abstract concepts, language and sociality: from acquisition to inner speech.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Language as a disruptive technology: abstract concepts, embodiment and the flexible mind.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
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2 authors.
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Abstract
One key issue for theories of cognition is how abstract concepts, such as freedom, are represented. According to the WAT (Words As social Tools) proposal, abstract concepts activate both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information, and their acquisition modality involves the linguistic experience more than the acquisition of concrete concepts. We report an experiment in which participants were presented with abstract and concrete definitions followed by concrete and abstract target-words. When the definition and the word matched, participants were required to press a key, either with the hand or with the mouth. Response times and accuracy were recorded. As predicted, we found that abstract definitions and abstract words yielded slower responses and more errors compared to concrete definitions and concrete words. More crucially, there was an interaction between the target-words and the effector used to respond (hand, mouth). While responses with the mouth were overall slower, the advantage of the hand over the mouth responses was more marked with concrete than with abstract concepts. The results are in keeping with grounded and embodied theories of cognition and support the WAT proposal, according to which abstract concepts evoke linguistic-social information, hence activate the mouth. The mechanisms underlying the mouth activation with abstract concepts (re-enactment of acquisition experience, or re-explanation of the word meaning, possibly through inner talk) are discussed. To our knowledge this is the first behavioral study demonstrating with real words that the advantage of the hand over the mouth is more marked with concrete than with abstract concepts, likely because of the activation of linguistic information with abstract concepts.
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