ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
Learning abstract words and concepts: insights from developmental language disorder.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Early Production of Imperceptible Words by Infants and Toddlers Born Deaf or Blind.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Ratings of valence, arousal, happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise for 24,000 Dutch words.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Learning to Listen: Changes in Children's Brain Activity Following a Listening Comprehension Intervention.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Concepts, abstractness and inner speech.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Editorial concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Some explanations of abstract word learning suggest that these words are learnt primarily from the linguistic input, using statistical co-occurrences of words in language, whereas concrete words can also rely on non-linguistic, experiential information. According to this hypothesis, we expect that, if the learner is not able to fully exploit the information in the linguistic input, abstract words should be affected more than concrete ones. Embodied approaches instead argue that both abstract and concrete words can rely on experiential information and, therefore, there might not be any linguistic primacy. Here, we test the role of linguistic input in the development of abstract knowledge with children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing children aged 8-13. We show that DLD children, who by definition have impoverished language, do not show a disproportionate impairment for abstract words in lexical decision and definition tasks. These results indicate that linguistic information does not have a primary role in the learning of abstract concepts and words; rather, it would play a significant role in semantic development across all domains of knowledge.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.
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