Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T15:43:01.489Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Varieties of abstract concepts and their multiple dimensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2019

CATERINA VILLANI ,
LUISA LUGLI ,
MARCO TULLIO LIUZZA  and
ANNA M. BORGHI Open the ORCID record for ANNA M. BORGHI [Opens in a new window]
CATERINA VILLANI*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, Italy
LUISA LUGLI
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, Italy
MARCO TULLIO LIUZZA
Affiliation:
Department of Medical and Surgery Sciences, University of Catanzaro, Italy
ANNA M. BORGHI*
Affiliation:
Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council, Italy
*
‡Caterina Villani, Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, via Azzo Gardino, 23, Bologna, 40122, Italy. e-mail: caterina.villani6@unibo.it
†Addresses for correspondence: Anna M. Borghi, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Via degli Apuli 1, Roma, 00185, Italy. e-mail: anna.borghi@uniroma1.it;
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The issue of how abstract concepts are represented is widely debated. However, evidence is controversial, also because different criteria were used to select abstract concepts – for example, imageability and abstractness were equated. In addition, for many years abstract concepts have been considered as a unitary whole. Our work aims to address these two limitations. We asked participants to evaluate 425 abstract concepts on 15 dimensions: abstractness, concreteness, imageability, context availability, Body-Object-Interaction, Modality of Acquisition, Age of Acquisition, Perceptual modality strength, Metacognition, Social metacognition, Interoception, Emotionality, Social valence, Hand and Mouth activation. Results showed that conceiving concepts only in terms of concreteness/abstractness is too simplified. More abstract concepts are typically acquired later and through the linguistic modality and are characterized by high scores in social metacognition (feeling that others can help us in understanding word meaning), while concrete concepts obtain high scores in Body-Object-Interaction, imageability, and context availability. A cluster analysis indicated four kinds of abstract concepts: philosophical-spiritual (e.g., value), self-sociality (e.g., politeness), emotive/inner states (e.g., anger), and physical, spatio-temporal, and quantitative concepts (e.g., reflex). Overall, results support multiple representation views indicating that sensorimotor, inner, linguistic, and social experience have different weights in characterizing different kinds of abstract concepts.

Keywords

abstract conceptsmultiple representation viewsembodied cognitionsocial metacognitionlanguagesociality
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 403 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Compliance with Ethical Standards: Funding: This study was funded by Sapienza University of Rome, Progetti di Ricerca Grandi, project “Abstract concepts, language and sociality” – protocol n. RG11715C7F1549F7 to A. M. Borghi. Conflict of Interest: None of the authors has conflicts of interest. Ethical approval: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. We would like to thank Laura Barca, Chiara Fini, Claudia Mazzuca, and Luca Tummolini for comments and discussions.

References

references

Altarriba, J. & Bauer, L. M. (2004). The distinctiveness of emotion concepts: a comparison between emotion, abstract, and concrete words. American Journal of Psychology 117(3), 389–410.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Altarriba, J., Bauer, L. M. & Benvenuto, C. (1999). Concreteness, context availability, and imageability ratings and word associations for abstract, concrete, and emotion words. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 31(4), 578–602.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barbaranelli, C. (2007). Analisi dei dati: tecniche multivariate per la ricerca psicologica e sociale. Milan: Edizioni universitarie di lettere economia diritto.Google Scholar
Barca, L., Burani, C. & Arduino, L. S. (2002). Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers: A Journal of the Psychonomic Society 34(3), 424–434.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barca, L., Mazzuca, C. & Borghi, A. M. (2017). Pacifier overuse and conceptual relations of abstract and emotional concepts. Frontiers in Psychology 8, 2014. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02014CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barsalou, L. W. (2003). Abstraction in perceptual symbol systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 358(1435), 1177–1187.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barsalou, L. W., Dutriaux, L. & Scheepers, C. (2018). Moving beyond the distinction between concrete and abstract concepts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0144CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barsalou, L. W. & Wiemer-Hastings, K. (2005). Situating abstract concepts. In Pecher, D. & Zwaan, R. (eds.), Grounding cognition: the role of perception and action in memory, language, and thought (pp. 129–163). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, S. D. R., Burnett, A. N., Siakaluk, P. D. & Pexman, P. M. (2011). Imageability and body-object interaction ratings for 599 multisyllabic nouns. Behavior Research Methods 43(4), 1100–1109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bolognesi, M. & Steen, G. (2018). Editors’ introduction: abstract concepts: structure, processing, and modeling. Topics in Cognitive Science 10(3), 490–500.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Borghi, A. M., Barca, L., Binkofski, F., Castelfranchi, C., Pezzulo, G. & Tummolini, L. (in press a). Words as social tools: language, sociality and inner grounding in abstract concepts. Physics of Life Reviews. doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2018.12.001Google Scholar
Borghi, A. M., Barca, L., Binkofski, F., Castelfranchi, C., Pezzulo, G. & Tummolini, L. (in press b). Words as social tools: flexibility, situatedness, language and sociality in abstract concepts. Reply to comments on ‘Words as social tools: language, sociality and inner grounding in abstract concepts’. Physics of Life Reviews. doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2019.06.004Google Scholar
Borghi, A. M., Barca, L., Binkofski, F. & Tummolini, L. (2018a). Abstract concepts, language and sociality: from acquisition to inner speech. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0134CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Borghi, A. M., Barca, L., Binkofski, F. & Tummolini, L. (2018b). Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0121CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borghi, A. M. & Binkofski, F. (2014). Words as social tools: an embodied view on abstract concepts. New York; Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borghi, A. M., Binkofski, F., Castelfranchi, C., Cimatti, F., Scorolli, C. & Tummolini, L. (2017). The challenge of abstract concepts. Psychological Bulletin 143(3), 263–292.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Borghi, A. M. & Cimatti, F. (2009). Words as tools and the problem of abstract words meanings. In Taatgen, N. & van Rijn, H. (eds.). Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2304–2309). Amsterdam: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Borghi, A. M. & Zarcone, E. (2016). Grounding abstractness: abstract concepts and the activation of the mouth. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 1498. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01498CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradley, M. M. & Lang, P. J. (1999). Affective Norms for English words (ANEW): instruction manual and affective ratings (Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 25-36). Technical report C-1, the Center for Research in Psychophysiology, University of Florida.Google Scholar
Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B. & Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas. Behavior Research Methods 46(3), 904–911.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Charrad, M., Ghazzali, N., Boiteau, V. & Niknafs, A., (2014). Package ‘NbClust.’ Journal of Statistical Software 61, 1–36.Google Scholar
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Connell, L. & Lynott, D. (2012). Strength of perceptual experience predicts word processing performance better than concreteness or imageability. Cognition 125(3), 452–465.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Connell, L., Lynott, D. & Banks, B. (2018). Interoception: the forgotten modality in perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0143CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Crutch, S. J., Troche, J., Reilly, J. & Ridgway, G. R. (2013). Abstract conceptual feature ratings: the role of emotion, magnitude, and other cognitive domains in the organization of abstract conceptual knowledge. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00186CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cuccio, V. & Gallese, V. (2018). A Peircean account of concepts: grounding abstraction in phylogeny through a comparative neuroscientific perspective. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0128CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dellantonio, S., Mulatti, C., Pastore, L. & Job, R. (2014). Measuring inconsistencies can lead you forward: imageability and the x-ception theory. Frontiers in Psychology 5. doi=10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00708CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Della Rosa, P. A., Catricalà, E., Vigliocco, G. & Cappa, S. F. (2010). Beyond the abstract–concrete dichotomy: mode of acquisition, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, context availability, and abstractness norms for a set of 417 Italian words. Behavior Research Methods 42(4), 1042–1048.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Desai, R. H., Reilly, M. & van Dam, W. (2018). The multifaceted abstract brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0122CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dove, G. (2010). On the need for embodied and dis-embodied cognition. Frontiers in Psychology 1. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00242Google ScholarPubMed
Dove, G. (2014). Thinking in words: language as an embodied medium of thought. Topics in Cognitive Science 6(3), 371–389.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dove, G. (2016). Three symbol ungrounding problems: abstract concepts and the future of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 23(4), 1109–1121.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dove, G. (2018). Language as a disruptive technology: abstract concepts, embodiment and the flexible mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0135CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dreyer, F. R., Frey, D., Arana, S., von Saldern, S., Picht, T., Vajkoczy, P. & Pulvermüller, F. (2015). Is the motor system necessary for processing action and abstract emotion words? Evidence from focal brain lesions. Frontiers in Psychology 6. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01661CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dreyer, F. R. & Pulvermüller, F. (2018). Abstract semantics in the motor system? An event-related fMRI study on passive reading of semantic word categories carrying abstract emotional and mental meaning. Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior 100, 52–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epskamp, S., Cramer, A. O., Waldorp, L. J., Schmittmann, V. D. & Borsboom, D. (2012). qgraph: network visualizations of relationships in psychometric data. Journal of Statistical Software 48(4), 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Everitt, B. S., Landau, S., Leese, M. & Stahl, D. (2001). Cluster analysis. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Ghio, M., Haegert, K., Vaghi, M. M. & Tettamanti, M. (2018). Sentential negation of abstract and concrete conceptual categories: a brain decoding multivariate pattern analysis study. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373. doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0124CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ghio, M., Vaghi, M. M. S. & Tettamanti, M. (2013). Fine-grained semantic categorization across the abstract and concrete domains. PloS One 8(6). doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0067090CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gilhooly, K. J. & Logie, R. H. (1980). Age-of-acquisition, imagery, concreteness, familiarity, and ambiguity measures for 1,944 words. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation 12(4), 395–427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harpaintner, M., Trumpp, N. M. & Kiefer, M. (2018). The semantic content of abstract concepts: a property listing study of 296 abstract words. Frontiers in Psychology 9. doi=10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01748CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harrell, F. E. Jr et al. (2018). Hmisc: Harrell Miscellaneous. R package version 4.1-1. Online <https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=Hmisc>..>Google Scholar
Humphreys, G. W. & Forde, E. M. (2001). Hierarchies, similarity, and interactivity in object recognition: ‘category-specific’ neuropsychological deficits. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(3), 453–476; discussion 476–509.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Juhasz, B. J. & Yap, M. J. (2013). Sensory experience ratings for over 5,000 mono- and disyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods 45(1), 160–168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kazanas, S. A. & Altarriba, J. (2015). The automatic activation of emotion and emotion-laden words: evidence from a masked and unmasked priming paradigm. American Journal of Psychology 128(3), 323–336.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kazanas, S. A. & Altarriba, J. (2016). Emotion word processing: effects of word type and valence in Spanish–English bilinguals. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 45(2), 395–406.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kousta, S.-T., Vigliocco, G., Vinson, D. P., Andrews, M. & Del Campo, E. (2011). The representation of abstract words: why emotion matters. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General 140(1), 14–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lupyan, G. & Winter, B. (2018). Language is more abstract than you think, or, why aren’t languages more iconic? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0137CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lynott, D. & Connell, L. (2013). Modality exclusivity norms for 400 nouns: the relationship between perceptual experience and surface word form. Behavior Research Methods 45(2), 516–526.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mazzuca, C., Lugli, L., Benassi, M., Nicoletti, R. & Borghi, A. M. (2018). Abstract, emotional and concrete concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors. PeerJ 6. doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5987CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mellem, M. S., Jasmin, K. M., Peng, C. & Martin, A. (2016). Sentence processing in anterior superior temporal cortex shows a social-emotional bias. Neuropsychologia 89, 217–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montefinese, M., Ambrosini, E., Fairfield, B. & Mammarella, N. (2013). Semantic memory: a feature-based analysis and new norms for Italian. Behavior Research Methods 45(2), 440–461.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Montefinese, M., Ambrosini, E., Fairfield, B., & Mammarella, N. (2014). The adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian. Behavior Research Methods 46(3), 887–903.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moseley, R., Carota, F., Hauk, O., Mohr, B. & Pulvermüller, F. (2011). A role for the motor system in binding abstract emotional meaning. Cerebral Cortex 22(7), 1634–1647.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newcombe, P. I., Campbell, C., Siakaluk, P. D. & Pexman, P. M. (2012). Effects of emotional and sensorimotor knowledge in semantic processing of concrete and abstract nouns. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00275CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paivio, A. (1990). Mental representations: a dual coding approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paivio, A., Clark, J. M. & Khan, M. (1988). Effects of concreteness and semantic relatedness on composite imagery ratings and cued recall. Memory & Cognition 16(5), 422–430.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pavlenko, A. (2008). Emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11(2), 147–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ponari, M., Norbury, C. F. & Vigliocco, G. (2018). Acquisition of abstract concepts is influenced by emotional valence. Developmental Science 21(2). doi.org/10.1111/desc.12549CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Prinz, J. J. (2004). Furnishing the mind: concepts and their perceptual basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Prinz, J. J. (2014). Beyond human nature: how culture and experience shape the human mind. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Pulvermüller, F. (2018a). Neural reuse of action perception circuits for language, concepts and communication. Progress in Neurobiology 160, 1–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pulvermüller, F. (2018b). The case of CAUSE: neurobiological mechanisms for grounding an abstract concept. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0129CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
R Core Team (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Online <https://www.R-project.org/>..>Google Scholar
RStudio Team (2015). RStudio: Integrated Development for R. RStudio, Inc., Boston, MA. Online <http://www.rstudio.com/>..>Google Scholar
Recchia, G. & Jones, M. N. (2012). The semantic richness of abstract concepts. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00315CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Revelle, W. R. (2018). psych: procedures for personality and psychological research, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA. Online <https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=psychVersion=1.8.10>.Google Scholar
Roversi, C., Borghi, A. M. & Tummolini, L. (2013). A marriage is an artefact and not a walk that we take together: an experimental study on the categorization of artefacts. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4(3), 527–542.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwanenflugel, P. J., Akin, C. & Luh, W. M. (1992). Context availability and the recall of abstract and concrete words. Memory & Cognition 20(1), 96–104.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Setti, A. & Caramelli, N. (2005). Different domains in abstract concepts. In Proceedings of the XXVII Annual Conference of Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1997–2002). New Jersey: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Shea, N. (2018). Metacognition and abstract concepts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373(1752). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0133CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Siakaluk, P. D., Pexman, P. M., Aguilera, L., Owen, W. J. & Sears, C. R. (2008). Evidence for the activation of sensorimotor information during visual word recognition: the body–object interaction effect. Cognition 106(1), 433–443.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tillotson, S. M., Siakaluk, P. D. & Pexman, P. M. (2008). Body–object interaction ratings for 1,618 monosyllabic nouns. Behavior Research Methods 40(4), 1075–1078.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Troche, J., Crutch, S. J. & Reilly, J. (2014). Clustering, hierarchical organization, and the topography of abstract and concrete nouns. Frontiers in Psychology 5. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00360CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Troche, J., Crutch, S. J. & Reilly, J. (2017). Defining a conceptual topography of word concreteness: clustering properties of emotion, sensation, and magnitude among 750 English words. Frontiers in Psychology 8. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01787CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vigliocco, G., Kousta, S. T., Della Rosa, P. A., Vinson, D. P., Tettamanti, M., Devlin, J. T. & Cappa, S. F. (2014). The neural representation of abstract words: the role of emotion. Cerebral Cortex 24(7), 1767–1777.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vigliocco, G., Kousta, S., Vinson, D., Andrews, M. & Del Campo, E. (2013). The representation of abstract words: What matters? Reply to Paivio’s (2013) comment on Kousta et al. (2011). Journal of Experimental Psychology. General 142(1), 288–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Villani, C., Lugli, L., Liuzza, M. T. & Borghi, A. M. (2019). Le sotto-categorie dei concetti astratti: uno studio empirico. Sistemi intelligenti 31(2), 235–252.Google Scholar
Warrington, E. K. & Shallice, T. (1984). Category specific semantic impairments. Brain 107(3), 829–853.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wauters, L. N., Tellings, A. E., Van Bon, W. H. & Van Haaften, A. W. (2003). Mode of acquisition of word meanings: the viability of a theoretical construct. Applied Psycholinguistics 24(3), 385–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wauters, L. N., Van Bon, W. H. & Tellings, A. E. (2006). Reading comprehension of Dutch deaf children. Reading and Writing 19(1), 49–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wei, T. & Simko, V. (2017). R package ‘corrplot’: visualization of a correlation matrix (version 0.84).’. Retrieved from <https://Github.Com/Taiyun/Corrplot>.Google Scholar
Wiemer-Hastings, K., Krug, J. & Xu, X. (2001). Imagery, context availability, contextual constraint and abstractness. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 23). Online <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9tm6p2rd>.Google Scholar
Zdrazilova, L. & Pexman, P. M. (2013). Grasping the invisible: semantic processing of abstract words. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 20(6), 1312–1318.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed