Search

Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, "concept" has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate semantic theories remain underspecified and/or opaque. Weak construct specificity is among the leading causes of the replication crisis now facing psychology and related fields. Term ambiguity hinders cross-disciplinary communication, falsifiability, and incremental theory-building. Numerous cognitive subdisciplines (e.g., vision, affective neuroscience) have recently addressed these limitations via the development of consensus-based guidelines and definitions. The project to follow represents our effort to produce a multidisciplinary semantic glossary consisting of succinct definitions, background, principled dissenting views, ratings of agreement, and subjective confidence for 17 target constructs (e.g., abstractness, abstraction, concreteness, concept, embodied cognition, event semantics, lexical-semantic, modality, representation, semantic control, semantic feature, simulation, semantic distance, semantic dimension). We discuss potential benefits and pitfalls (e.g., implicit bias, prescriptiveness) of these efforts to specify a common nomenclature that other researchers might index in specifying their own theoretical perspectives (e.g., They said X, but I mean Y). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study introduces affective norms for a set of 880 German words rated by learners of German as a second language (L2), i.e., the Affective Norms for German as a Second Language (ANGL2). The database provides ratings across affective and subjective psycholinguistic dimensions. Besides valence and arousal ratings, ANGL2 features data on emotional prototypicality, which helps to identify emotion-label words and emotion-laden words. Moreover, the database includes two additional semantic variables: concreteness and familiarity. We observed similarities with previous studies, and the ratings provided by L2 speakers demonstrate characteristics that should be noted in studies involving bilinguals, including more moderate valence ratings, and a stronger correlation between valence and arousal, specifically for positive words. ANGL2 is the first set of affective norms that has been rated by L2 speakers for a language other than English. The set of norms is aimed to function as a resource for psycholinguistic experimental studies on the intersection between emotion and language among L2 speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to provide accurate estimates of concreteness, valence, and arousal for multi-word expressions. Unlike previous artificial intelligence (AI) methods, LLMs can capture the nuanced meanings of multi-word expressions. We systematically evaluated GPT-4o's ability to predict concreteness, valence, and arousal. In Study 1, GPT-4o showed strong correlations with human concreteness ratings (r =.8) for multi-word expressions. In Study 2, these findings were repeated for valence and arousal ratings of individual words, matching or outperforming previous AI models. Studies 3–5 extended the valence and arousal analysis to multi-word expressions and showed good validity of the LLM-generated estimates for these stimuli as well. To help researchers with stimulus selection, we provide datasets with LLM-generated norms of concreteness, valence, and arousal for 126,397 English single words and 63,680 multi-word expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In psycholinguistics, studies are conducted to understand language processing mechanisms, whether in comprehension or in production, and independently of the language modality. To do so, researchers need accurate psycholinguistic information about the linguistic material they use. One main obstacle to this process is the lack of information available in sign language. While some lexical databases exist in multiple sign languages, to the best of our knowledge, psycholinguistic data for French Sign Language (LSF) signs are not yet available. The present study presents FLexSign, the first interactive lexical database for LSF, inspired by ASL-Lex (Caselli et al., 2017). The database includes familiarity, concreteness, and iconicity data for 546 signs of LSF. These three factors are known to influence the speed or the accuracy of lexical processing. Familiarity and concreteness are known to generate a robust facilitative effect on sign processing, while iconicity plays a complex but crucial role in the creation and organization of sign language lexicons. Therefore, having accurate information on the iconicity of LSF signs would help to better understand the role of this notion in lexical processing. To develop the database, 33 participants were recruited and asked to complete an online questionnaire. The FLexSign database will be of great use to sign language researchers, providing linguistic information that was previously unavailable and offering many opportunities at both the experimental and clinical levels. The database is also open to future contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research has shown that children's early words are learned through sensorimotor experience. Thus, early-acquired words tend to have more concrete meanings. Abstract word meanings tend to be learned later but less is known about their acquisition. We collected meaning-specific concreteness ratings and examined their relationship with age-of-acquisition data from large-scale vocabulary testing with children in grade 2 to college age. Earlier-acquired meanings were rated as more concrete while later-acquired meanings as more abstract, particularly for words typically considered to be concrete. The results suggest that sensorimotor experiences are important to early-acquired word meanings, and other experiences (e.g. linguistic) are important to later-acquired meanings, consistent with a multi-representational view of lexical semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstraction processes involve two variables that are often confused with one another: concreteness (banana versus belief) and specificity (chair versus furniture or Buddhism versus religion). Researchers are investigating the relationship between them, but many questions remain open, such as: What type of semantics characterizes words with varying degrees of concreteness and specificity? We tackle this topic through an in-depth semantic analysis of 1049 Italian words for which human-generated concreteness and specificity ratings are available. Our findings show that (as expected) the semantics of concrete and abstract concepts differs, but most interestingly when specificity is considered, the variance in concreteness ratings explained by semantic types increases substantially, suggesting the need to carefully control word specificity in future research. For instance, mathematical concepts (phase) are on average abstract and generic, while behavioral qualities (arrogant) are on average abstract but specific. Moreover, through cluster analyses based on concreteness and specificity ratings, we observe the bottom-up emergence of four subgroups of semantically coherent words. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence and theoretical insight into the interplay of concreteness and specificity in shaping semantic categorization.

Abstraction processes involve two variables that are often confused with one another: concreteness (banana versus belief) and specificity (chair versus furniture or Buddhism versus religion). Researchers are investigating the relationship between them, but many questions remain open, such as: What type of semantics characterizes words with varying degrees of concreteness and specificity? We tackle this topic through an in-depth semantic analysis of 1049 Italian words for which human-generated concreteness and specificity ratings are available. Our findings show that (as expected) the semantics of concrete and abstract concepts differs, but most interestingly when specificity is considered, the variance in concreteness ratings explained by semantic types increases substantially, suggesting the need to carefully control word specificity in future research. For instance, mathematical concepts (phase) are on average abstract and generic, while behavioral qualities (arrogant) are on average abstract but specific. Moreover, through cluster analyses based on concreteness and specificity ratings, we observe the bottom-up emergence of four subgroups of semantically coherent words. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence and theoretical insight into the interplay of concreteness and specificity in shaping semantic categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many psychologists currently assume that there is a psychologically real distinction to be made between concepts that are abstract and concepts that are concrete. It is for example largely agreed that concepts and words are more easily processed if they are concrete. Moreover, it is assumed that this is because these words and concepts are concrete. It is thought that interesting generalizations can be made about certain concepts because they are concrete. I argue that we have surprisingly little reason to believe that the abstract‐concrete distinction is psychologically real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many models of lexical and semantic processing, it is assumed that single word processing is a function of the characteristics of the words presented and the distributional properties of the words' networks. Recent research suggests that semantic characteristics of a target word's associates may in fact influence target-word responses in lexical-semantic tasks. The present study extends that previous research to examine whether lexical and semantic properties of target-word associates are recruited during lexical and semantic decision tasks, and whether the type of associate information recruited varies as a function of task and concreteness of the target word. We found that lexical-semantic properties of words' first associates are related to accuracy of responses to words in lexical decision, and that semantic properties of words' first associates are related to both response time and accuracy in semantic decision. Further, these effects differ depending on the target word's concreteness. These findings provide new insight about the way words' associates contribute to semantic representation and processing, even though the associates are not actually presented, moving beyond previous assumptions about lexical-semantic processing of single words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a collection of concreteness ratings for 35,979 words in Estonian. The data were collected via a web application from 2278 native Estonian speakers. Human ratings of concreteness have not been collected for Estonian beforehand. We compare our results to Aedmaa et al. (2018), who assigned concreteness ratings to 240,000 Estonian words by means of machine learning. We show that while these two datasets show reasonable correlation (R = 0.71), there are considerable differences in the distribution of the ratings, which we discuss in this paper. Furthermore, the results also raise questions about the importance of the type of scale used for collecting ratings. While most other datasets have been compiled based on questionnaires entailing five- or seven-point Likert scales, we used a continuous 0–10 scale. Comparing our rating distribution to those of other studies, we found that it is most similar to the distribution in Lahl et al. (Behavior Research Methods,41(1), 13–19, 2009), who also used a 0–10 scale. Concreteness ratings for Estonian words are available at OSF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective information contained in words is gaining increased attention among neurolinguists and psycholinguists around the world. This study established the Affective Norms for Chinese Words (ANCW) with valence, arousal, dominance, and concreteness ratings for 4030 words that were Chinese adaptations of the CET-4 (The National College English Test Band 4) official syllabus. Despite the existing Chinese affective norms such as the Chinese Affective Words System (CAWS), the ANCW provides much more and richer Chinese vocabulary. By using 7-point (ranging from 1 to 7) Likert scales in a paper-and-pencil procedure, we obtained ratings for all variables from 3717 Chinese undergraduates. The ANCW norms possessed good response reliability and were compatible with prior normative studies in Chinese. The pairwise correlation analysis revealed quadratic relations between valence and arousal, arousal and dominance, as well as valence and concreteness. Additionally, valence and dominance, as well as arousal and concreteness, presented a linear correlation, and concreteness and dominance were correlated. The ANCW provides reliable and standardized stimulus materials for further research involving emotional language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Affective Embodiment Account posits that sensorimotor interactions play an important role in learning and processing concrete words whereas experiences from emotional states play an important role in learning and processing abstract words. Because of this, there should be greater enhancement of valence for abstract than for concrete words and therefore there should be an interaction between valence and concreteness. Although this prediction has been observed in a number of tasks, very few studies have looked specifically at memory. Three experiments are reported that assess whether valence interacts with concreteness in recognition. In Experiment 1, recognition of concrete words was better than abstract, but there was no difference as a function of whether the words were positive or negative and there was no interaction. Experiment 2 compared positive and neutral words and Experiment 3 compared negative and neutral words; in both, there was a concreteness effect but no effect of valence and no interaction. These results replicate previous findings that when positive and negative words are equated more fully, valence has no effect on recognition, and also suggest a limit on the scope of the Affective Embodiment Account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verb production impairments in aphasia have important implications for sentence production and communication in general. Verbs with low concreteness may be especially important for certain functional uses, and yet limited data regarding their response to treatment are available. This study was designed to examine a novel behavioral treatment approach to improve low concreteness verb naming in persons with aphasia. Three persons with nonfluent aphasia participated in a single-subject experimental design research study examining the feasibility of the novel treatment. The treatment was based on approaches that target the verb as the central node of meaning during sentence construction. The primary outcome measure was a sentence completion probe. Effects on untreated stimuli and on general language and naming assessments were also examined. Results indicated some limited changes associated with the treatment for two of the participants. Treatment performance data suggested possible improvements in verb processing that were not reflected in the primary outcome measure. Modest decreases in aphasia severity were noted for two of the participants. The findings provide further support for targeting verbal production of verbs with low concreteness in aphasia. Several lessons learned may benefit future researchers examining areas related to the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We replicated and extended the findings of Yao et al. [(2018). Differential emotional processing in concrete and abstract words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(7), 1064–1074] regarding the interaction of emotionality, concreteness, and imageability in word processing by measuring eye fixation times on target words during normal reading. A 3 (Emotion: negative, neutral, positive) × 2 (Concreteness: abstract, concrete) design was used with 22 items per condition, with each set of six target words matched across conditions in terms of word length and frequency. Abstract (e.g. shocking, reserved, fabulous) and concrete (e.g. massacre, calendar, treasure) target words appeared (separately) within contextually neutral, plausible sentences. Sixty-three participants each read all 132 experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded. Analyses using Gamma generalised linear mixed models revealed significant effects of both Emotion and Concreteness on all fixation measures, indicating faster processing for emotional and concrete words. Additionally, there was a significant Emotion × Concreteness interaction which, critically, was modulated by Imageability in early fixation time measures. Emotion effects were significantly larger in higher-imageability abstract words than in lower-imageability ones, but remained unaffected by imageability in concrete words. These findings support the multimodal induction hypothesis and highlight the intricate interplay of these factors in the immediate stages of word processing during fluent reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advertising is methods to encourage donations, and text is one of the most crucial fundamental elements in advertising. Therefore, we chose advertising slogans as the focus of this study. The main goal of this research is to investigate how the emotional and concrete aspects of advertising slogans can impact information processing procedures and neural mechanisms, ultimately influencing advertising effectiveness. We conducted a two-factor experiment with a 2 × 2 design, using the ERPs experimental paradigm. The results reveal that slogans with an emotionally positive appeal outperformed in terms of advertising memory (recognition response time) and audience intention (liking, acting, and sharing). Emotional-negative advertising slogans performed better in eliciting early attention (P1). Concrete advertising slogans excelled in enhancing advertising memory (recognition response time, correct recognition rate), as well as in the later stages of information processing stage (N400 and LPC). Furthermore, abstract advertising slogans performed better in capturing early attention (P2) and influencing action intention. We introduce a framework comprising five distinct phases for individuals to process the advertising slogans and emphasize the foundational role of emotions in individual cognition and the processing of advertising. These findings uncover the underlying mechanism behind the effectiveness of donation advertising and provide valuable insights for the design of philanthropic advertising practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the effects of hyponymy and emotion on the comprehension and production of compound words. The research subjects are over 2000 concatenated compounds of English taken from the LADEC database (Gagné et al. 2019). The study builds on the research carried out in Charitonidis (2022), according to which context concreteness for the second constituent was a significant positive predictor of lexical decision and naming times from the English Lexicon Project (ELP) and the British Lexicon Project (BLP). In the present paper, the hyponymy norms from Gagné et al. (2020) were added in the analysis. The results show that both hyponymy and context concreteness for the second constituent are relevant. In addition, all models including both variables have a better fit than nested models omitting one of these variables. There is thus strong evidence that both hyponymy and context concreteness for the second constituent are obligatory parameters in compound word processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We used eye-tracking during natural reading to study how semantic control and representation mechanisms interact for the successful comprehension of sentences, by manipulating sentence context and single-word meaning. Specifically, we examined whether a word's semantic characteristic (concreteness) affects first fixation and gaze durations (FFDs and GDs) and whether it interacts with the predictability of a word. We used a linear mixed effects model including several possible psycholinguistic covariates. We found a small but reliable main effect of concreteness and replicated a predictability effect on FFDs, but we found no interaction between the two. The results parallel previous findings of additive effects of predictability (context) and frequency (lexical level) in fixation times. Our findings suggest that the semantics of a word and the context created by the preceding words additively influence early stages of word processing in natural sentence reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and Objectives: Translation equivalents intuitively seem to overlap in meaning. Moreover, the models of the bilingual lexicon often represent the meaning shared between two translations as a holistic node in the semantic network. However, research on semantic representation and processing questions this holistic approach. For instance, abstract words are assumed to be more language-dependent, while concrete words' meanings are seen as more consistent cross-linguistically. The non-cognate translation priming paradigm offers an ideal methodological setting to study semantic overlap (proxied by concreteness) between translations. Priming effects between non-cognate translation equivalents are assumed to emerge due to spreading activation at the semantic level. Hence, a larger semantic overlap between translation prime-target pairs should lead to larger priming effects. Nevertheless, the evidence from previous translation priming studies investigating concreteness displays a blurry picture, potentially reflecting a shared limitation: their relatively small sample sizes. We overcame this problem by analysing the largest translation priming dataset to date. Methodology: Two hundred Spanish–English highly proficient bilinguals were tested in a bidirectional translation priming experiment employing 314 non-cognate translation equivalents differing in concreteness. Data and analysis: We analysed response times and error rates employing conservative (generalized) linear mixed-effects models. Findings: The results showed that concrete translation pairs elicited larger priming effects than abstract ones, evidencing differences in semantic representation between concrete and abstract words. Importantly, the influence of concreteness appeared only in the forward translation direction, suggesting language experience-related differences in meaning representation. Originality: The present study analysed the largest dataset in the translation priming literature to date, employing a conservative statistical approach to shed light on the effects of concreteness on translation priming. Implications: Our study spotlights the complexity and non-holistic nature of the bilingual semantic representation of concrete and abstract words. The present findings call for more research to help the current models of the bilingual lexicon implement more nuanced semantic representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I suggest how a moderated form of pause or withdrawal may yield relational fruit in contexts of interpersonal encounter. Consequently, I posit that mystical nothingness – otherwise known as Ayin in Jewish mystical lore – offers a promising way forward, and indicate how it may be synonymous with Buberian concreteness and inclusion. In conclusion, I explore the Tsaddik as a metaphor that highlights not only the relevance of Ayin or nothingness interpersonally, but also its complementarity with the I and Thou encounter as envisaged by Martin Buber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study, we developed affective (valence and arousal) and sensory–motor (concreteness and imageability) norms for 210 English idioms rated by native English speakers (L1) and English second-language speakers (L2). Based on internal consistency analyses, the ratings were found to be highly reliable. Furthermore, we explored various relations within the collected measures (valence, arousal, concreteness, and imageability) and between these measures and some available psycholinguistic norms (familiarity, literal plausibility, and decomposability) for the same set of idioms. The primary findings were that (i) valence and arousal showed the typical U-shape relation, for both L1 and L2 data; (ii) idioms with more negative valence were rated as more arousing; (iii) the majority of idioms were rated as either positive or negative with only 4 being rated as neutral; (iv) familiarity correlated positively with valence and arousal; (v) concreteness and imageability showed a strong positive correlation; and (vi) the ratings of L1 and L2 speakers significantly differed for arousal and concreteness, but not for valence and imageability. We discuss our interpretation of these observations with reference to the literature on figurative language processing (both single words and idioms). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word frequency is one of the best predictors of language processing. Typically, word frequency norms are entirely based on natural-language text data, thus representing what the literature typically refers to as purely linguistic experience. This study presents Flickr frequency norms as a novel word frequency measure from a domain-specific corpus inherently tied to extra-linguistic information: words used as image tags on social media. To obtain Flickr frequency measures, we exploited the photo-sharing platform Flickr Image (containing billions of photos) and extracted the number of uploaded images tagged with each of the words considered in the lexicon. Here, we systematically examine the peculiarities of Flickr frequency norms and show that Flickr frequency is a hybrid metrics, lying at the intersection between language and visual experience and with specific biases induced by being based on image-focused social media. Moreover, regression analyses indicate that Flickr frequency captures additional information beyond what is already encoded in existing norms of linguistic, sensorimotor, and affective experience. Therefore, these new norms capture aspects of language usage that are missing from traditional frequency measures: a portion of language usage capturing the interplay between language and vision, which – this study demonstrates – has its own impact on word processing. The Flickr frequency norms are openly available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/2zfs3/). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strongest formulations of grounded cognition assume that perceptual intuitions about concepts involve the re-activation of sensorimotor experience we have made with their referents in the world. Within this framework, concreteness and imageability ratings are indeed of crucial importance by operationalising the amount of perceptual interaction we have made with objects. Here we tested such an assumption by asking whether visual intuitions about concepts are provided accurately even when direct visual experience is absent. To this aim, we considered concreteness and imageability intuitions in blind people and tested whether these judgments are predicted by Image-based Frequency (IF, i.e. a data-driven estimate approximating the availability of the word referent in the visual environment). Results indicated that IF predicts perceptual intuitions with a larger extent in sighted compared to blind individuals, thus suggesting a role of direct experience in shaping our judgements. However, the effect of IF was significant not only in sighted but also in blind individuals. This indicates that having direct visual experience with objects does not play a critical role in making them concrete and imageable in a person's intuitions: people do not need visual experience to develop intuition about the availability of things in the external visual environment and use this intuition to inform concreteness/imageability judgments. Our findings fit closely the idea that perceptual judgments are the outcome of introspection/abstraction tasks invoking high-level conceptual knowledge that is not necessarily acquired via direct perceptual experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meaning of most words in language depends on their context. Understanding how the human brain extracts contextualized meaning, and identifying where in the brain this takes place, remain important scientific challenges. But technological and computational advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence now provide unprecedented opportunities to study the human brain in action as language is read and understood. Recent contextualized language models seem to be able to capture homonymic meaning variation ("bat", in a baseball vs. a vampire context), as well as more nuanced differences of meaning—for example, polysemous words such as "book", which can be interpreted in distinct but related senses ("explain a book", information, vs. "open a book", object) whose differences are fine‐grained. We study these subtle differences in lexical meaning along the concrete/abstract dimension, as they are triggered by verb‐noun semantic composition. We analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activations elicited by Italian verb phrases containing nouns whose interpretation is affected by the verb to different degrees. By using a contextualized language model and human concreteness ratings, we shed light on where in the brain such fine‐grained meaning variation takes place and how it is coded. Our results show that phrase concreteness judgments and the contextualized model can predict BOLD activation associated with semantic composition within the language network. Importantly, representations derived from a complex, nonlinear composition process consistently outperform simpler composition approaches. This is compatible with a holistic view of semantic composition in the brain, where semantic representations are modified by the process of composition itself. When looking at individual brain areas, we find that encoding performance is statistically significant, although with differing patterns of results, suggesting differential involvement, in the posterior superior temporal sulcus, inferior frontal gyrus and anterior temporal lobe, and in motor areas previously associated with processing of concreteness/abstractness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organisation of concepts in the mental lexicon is a widely studied research topic in experimental psychology. For instance, several studies have shown that whereas concrete concepts are organised according to semantic similarity, abstract concepts are organised according to verbal association. However, these results are not systematically replicated, mainly due to a lack of normative database especially in French. To that end, we introduce a French word-association database for 1,100 cues with varying levels of concreteness from abstract to concrete concepts. Analyses from the word-association task revealed stronger association strength for concrete concepts compared with abstract concepts. Additional results showed that cues tend to elicit responses of a similar level of concreteness. The database will be useful for investigators interested in French verbal associations for abstract and concrete concepts. The data (available on OSF https://osf.io/dhuqs/) introduce responses organised according to association strength and provides cue concreteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we asked how the emotional status, i.e., valence and arousal, and concreteness of idioms contribute to their processing. Additionally, we asked whether the contribution of emotional factors and concreteness is modulated by other linguistic constraints, specifically idiom familiarity and decomposability, that has been shown to impact idiom processing. Participants read short idiomatic phrases (e.g., he kicked the bucket), word-by-word and for comprehension while their reaction time was recorded. The results showed that the emotional status of idioms contribute to their processing and this contribution is modulated by familiarity and decomposability levels of idioms in different ways. In particular, the impact of valence (i.e., the degree an idiom is pleasant/unpleasant) was modulated by familiarity, and the impact of arousal was modulated by decomposability. We did not find strong evidence for the contribution of concreteness for idiom processing. Our findings are aligned with theories of semantic representation, which suggest that besides linguistic information, sensory-motor and affective information are fundamental in representing meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Like objects, instructional language can be either concrete or generic. • Concreteness matched at both language and object levels for congruent materials. • Concreteness not matched at language and object levels for incongruent materials. • Children acquire equal sharing knowledge better with incongruent materials. Manipulatives are often used to help children master mathematical concepts. The present study investigated whether concreteness of the object and concreteness of the language used to describe it mattered for effectiveness. Two hundred and twenty-five kindergarten children were taught how to solve equal sharing problems with one of the four methods: concrete-object-concrete-language, concrete-object-generic-language, generic-object-concrete-language, generic-object-generic-language. Their knowledge of equal sharing was pre- and post-tested. Results of the 2×2×2 mixed-design ANOVA suggested that there was a significant interaction effect between the concreteness of object and concreteness of language on the differences in equal sharing knowledge across the two tests. Follow-up analysis revealed that children showed greater improvement in knowledge when incongruent methods (i.e., concrete-object-generic-language, generic-object-concrete-language) were adopted. These findings suggest that when teaching mathematics with manipulatives, early childhood educators should use generic language to label concrete manipulatives, but concrete language to label generic manipulatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjective ratings have been central to the evaluation of icon characteristics. The current study examined biases in ratings in relation to the context in which icons are presented. Context was manipulated between participants, with some groups rating icon sets with limited variability, and others rating icon sets with wide variability. It was predicted that the context created by the icon set would influence participants' ratings; when the range of icons was limited, this would create bias given participants' expectation that a full range of icon values was being presented. Six key icon characteristics were rated, which were visual (visual complexity, appeal), affective (valence, feelings), and semantic (concreteness, semantic distance). Some icon characteristics were susceptible to rating bias while others were not. Where subjective judgements were being made of visual icon characteristics (appeal/complexity) and highly concrete icons which were very pictorial, there was clear evidence of substantial bias in ratings. The same susceptibility to bias was not evident when ratings relied solely on learned semantic associations or were associated with the emotional attributions made to icons. The dynamic nature of the ratings bias was demonstrated when the rating context was changed without participants' knowledge. When participants rated further blocks of icons providing a different range of the to-be-rated characteristic, this resulted in rapid and dramatic changes in rating behaviour. These findings demonstrate the need for representative sampling of icon characteristics to avoid ratings bias. Practically, this is important when determining the usability of newly designed icon sets in order to avoid over-valuing or under-valuing of key characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstraction enables us to categorize experience, learn new information, and form judgments. Language arguably plays a crucial role in abstraction, providing us with words that vary in specificity (e.g., highly generic: tool vs. highly specific: muffler). Yet, human-generated ratings of word specificity are virtually absent. We hereby present a dataset of specificity ratings collected from Italian native speakers on a set of around 1K Italian words, using the Best-Worst Scaling method. Through a series of correlation studies, we show that human-generated specificity ratings have low correlation coefficients with specificity metrics extracted automatically from WordNet, suggesting that WordNet does not reflect the hierarchical relations of category inclusion present in the speakers' minds. Moreover, our ratings show low correlations with concreteness ratings, suggesting that the variables Specificity and Concreteness capture two separate aspects involved in abstraction and that specificity may need to be controlled for when investigating conceptual concreteness. Finally, through a series of regression studies we show that specificity explains a unique amount of variance in decision latencies (lexical decision task), suggesting that this variable has theoretical value. The results are discussed in relation to the concept and investigation of abstraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous task. To facilitate effective use of these measures, this study consists of a literature review of concreteness, imageability, semantic network variables, and embodied variables. In each section, the theory underlying each variable is first outlined with the methods employed in norming studies delineated next. The final part of each section consists of an exemplary study in which the semantic variable was employed in analyses. The overarching goal of this review is to facilitate effective theory-driven use of these variables in L2 research and materials creation.

Many datasets resulting from participant ratings for word norms and also concreteness ratios are available. However, the concreteness information of infrequent words and non-words is rare. This work aims to propose a model for estimating the concreteness of infrequent and new lexicons. Here, we used Lancaster sensory-motor word norms to predict the word concreteness ratios of an English word dataset. After removing the missing values, we employed a stepwise multiple linear regression (SW-MLR) procedure for choosing an optimum number of norms to develop a predictive multiple regression model. Finally, we validate our model using 10-fold cross-validation. The final model could predict concreteness by Residual Mean Standard Error equal to 0.723 and R-Square of 0.515. Also, our results showed that all 11 variables of this dataset except the Head-mouth parameter are useful predictors. In conclusion, as a growing demand to know the concreteness values of non-words and also infrequent words is evident, our statistical method can pave the way for controlled experiments when choosing non-words as a stimulus is critical.

Several norms of psycholinguistic features of Chinese characters exist in Mandarin Chinese, but only a few are available in Cantonese or in the traditional script, and none includes semantic radical transparency ratings. This study presents subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), familiarity, imageability, concreteness, and semantic radical transparency in 4376 Chinese characters. The single Chinese characters were rated individually on the five dimensions by 20 native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong to form the Hong Kong Chinese Character Psycholinguistic Norms (HKCCPN). The split-half reliability and intra-class correlations testified to the high internal reliability of the ratings. Their convergent and discriminant patterns in relations to other psycholinguistic measures echoed previous findings reported on Chinese. There were high correlations for semantic radical transparency, imageability and concreteness, and moderate-to-high correlations for AoA and familiarity among subsets of items that had been collected in previous studies. Concurrent validity analyses showed convergence in predicting behavioral response times in various tasks (lexical decision, naming, and writing-to-dictation) when compared with other Chinese character databases. High predictive validity was shown in writing-to-dictation data from an independent sample of 20 native Cantonese speakers. Several objective psycholinguistic measures (character frequency, stroke number, number of words formed, number of homophones and number of meanings) were included in this database to facilitate its use. These new ratings extend the currently available norms in language and reading research in Cantonese Chinese for researchers, clinicians, and educators, as well as provide them with a wider choice of stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many datasets resulting from participant ratings for word norms and also concreteness ratios are available. However, the concreteness information of infrequent words and non-words is rare. This work aims to propose a model for estimating the concreteness of infrequent and new lexicons. Here, we used Lancaster sensory-motor word norms to predict the word concreteness ratios of an English word dataset. After removing the missing values, we employed a stepwise multiple linear regression (SW-MLR) procedure for choosing an optimum number of norms to develop a predictive multiple regression model. Finally, we validate our model using 10-fold cross-validation. The final model could predict concreteness by Residual Mean Standard Error equal to 0.723 and R-Square of 0.515. Also, our results showed that all 11 variables of this dataset except the Head-mouth parameter are useful predictors. In conclusion, as a growing demand to know the concreteness values of non-words and also infrequent words is evident, our statistical method can pave the way for controlled experiments when choosing non-words as a stimulus is critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concreteness describes the degree to which a word's meaning is understood through perception and action. Many studies use the Brysbaert et al. (2014) concreteness ratings to investigate language processing and text analysis. However, these ratings are limited to English single words and a few two-word expressions. Increasingly, attention is focused on the importance of multiword expressions, given their centrality in everyday language use and language acquisition. We present concreteness ratings for 62,889 multiword expressions and examine their relationship to the existing concreteness ratings for single words and two-word expressions. These new ratings represent the first big dataset of multiword expressions, and will be useful for researchers interested in language acquisition and language processing, as well as natural language processing and text analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tangram pictures are abstract pictures which may be used as stimuli in various fields of experimental psychology and are often used in the field of dialogue psychology. The present study provides the first norms for a set of 332 tangram pictures. These pictures were standardized on a set of variables classically used in the literature on cognitive processes, such as visual perception, language, and memory: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Furthermore, norms for concreteness were also provided owing to the influence of this variable on the processes involved in lexical production. Correlational analyses on all variables were performed on the data collected from French native speakers. This new set of standardized pictures constitutes a reliable database for researchers when they select tangram pictures. Given the abstract nature of tangram pictures, this paper also discusses the similarities and differences with the literature on line drawings, and highlights their value for dialogue psychology studies, for psycholinguistics studies, and for cognitive psychology in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies which provide norms of Likert ratings typically report per-item summary statistics. Traditionally, these summary statistics comprise the mean and the standard deviation (SD) of the ratings, and the number of observations. Such summary statistics can preserve the rank order of items, but provide distorted estimates of the relative distances between items because of the ordinal nature of Likert ratings. Inter-item relations in such ordinal scales can be more appropriately modelled by cumulative link mixed effects models (CLMMs). In a series of simulations, and with a reanalysis of an existing rating norms dataset, we show that CLMMs can be used to more accurately norm items, and can provide summary statistics analogous to the traditionally reported means and SDs, but which are disentangled from participants' response biases. CLMMs can be applied to solve important statistical issues that exist for more traditional analyses of rating norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to acquire positive emotions from words is essential to psychological well-being. How word concreteness affects the process of positive emotion acquisition remains unknown. Here, using an evaluation conditioning paradigm, participants learned the association between pseudowords and concrete/abstract and positive/neutral words. Behavior and event-related potential data were recorded while participants performed emotional recognition tasks. Behavioral results showed that, for neutral words, concrete words were more accurate than abstract words, whereas for positive words, abstract words were more accurate than concrete words. Moreover, N1 and P2 amplitudes in the pseudowords were modulated by interacting word emotion and concreteness. Specifically, pseudowords associated with neutral concrete words elicited larger N1 and P2 amplitudes than pseudowords associated with neutral abstract words. Conversely, N1 and P2 amplitudes in pseudowords associated with positive abstract words were not significant compared to those in positive concrete words. Additionally, an emotional effect was observed when pseudowords were associated with abstract words, showing higher P3 amplitude for the pseudowords associated with positive abstract words than neutral abstract words. No significant effects were found for the pseudowords associated with positive abstract or concrete words. These findings suggest that association learning may influence the early attention processing of emotion acquisition from words, and emotional information of positive abstract words might boost positive emotion acquisition, thereby eliminating the acquisition advantage from positive concrete words.

Deaf and hearing readers have different access to spoken phonology which may affect the representation and recognition of written words. We used ERPs to investigate how a matched sample of deaf and hearing adults (total n = 90) responded to lexical characteristics of 480 English words in a go/no-go lexical decision task. Results from mixed effect regression models showed (a) visual complexity produced small effects in opposing directions for deaf and hearing readers, (b) similar frequency effects, but shifted earlier for deaf readers, (c) more pronounced effects of orthographic neighbourhood density for hearing readers, and (d) more pronounced effects of concreteness for deaf readers. We suggest hearing readers have visual word representations that are more integrated with phonological representations, leading to larger lexically-mediated effects of neighbourhood density. Conversely, deaf readers weight other sources of information more heavily, leading to larger semantically-mediated effects and altered responses to low-level visual variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plenty of studies have been conducted to reveal neurocognitive underpinnings of conceptual representation. Compared with that of concrete concepts, the neurocognitive correlates of abstract concepts remain elusive. The current study aimed to investigate the influence of conceptual concreteness on the reading acquisition and integration of novel words into semantic memory. We constructed two-sentence contexts in which two-character pseudowords were embedded as novel words. Participants read the contexts to infer the meaning of novel words which were either concrete or abstract, and then performed a lexical decision task and a cued-recall memory task. In lexical decision task, primed by the learned novel words, their corresponding concepts, thematically related or unrelated words as well as unlearned pseudowords were judged whether they were words or not. In memory task, participants were presented with the novel words and asked to write down their meaning. The contextual reading and memory test can demonstrate the modulation of conceptual concreteness on novel word learning and the lexical decision task can reveal whether concrete and abstract novel words are integrated into semantic memory similarly or not. During contextual reading, abstract novel words presented for the first time elicited a larger N400 than concrete ones. In memory task, the meaning of concrete novel words was recollected better than abstract novel words. These results indicate that abstract novel words are more difficult to acquire during contextual reading, and to retain afterwards. For lexical decision task behavioral and ERPs were graded, with the longest reaction time, the lowest accuracy and the largest N400s for the unrelated words, then the thematically related words and finally the corresponding concepts of the novel words, regardless of conceptual concreteness. The results suggest that both concrete and abstract novel words can be integrated into semantic memory via thematic relations. These findings are discussed in terms of differential representational framework which posits that concrete words connect with each other via semantic similarities, and abstract ones via thematic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reasoning with counterfactuals such as "if his sister had entered silently, the child would have been awake", requires considering what is conjectured ("his sister entered silently") and what is the counterfactual possibility ("his sister did not enter silently"). In two experiments, we test how both adults (Study 1) and children from 8 to 12 years (Study 2) construct counterfactual possibilities about the cause of an effect ("the child was awake because..."). We test specifically whether people construct the counterfactual possibility by recovering alternatives, for example, "the alarm clock sounded" or by using the syntactic negation using propositional symbols ("his sister did not enter silently"). Moreover, as children show difficulty in thinking with abstract contents, we test whether they construct the counterfactual possibility more readily by recovering concrete alternatives ("the alarm clock sounded") rather than abstract alternatives ("he had trouble sleeping"). Results showed that children, as well as adults, recovered the alternative as the cause of the effect rather than the negation. Moreover, children, unlike adults, created the counterfactual possibility more frequently by recovering concrete situations rather than abstract situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the (in)famous fourth law of Kuryłowicz (K4), when a morphological doublet arises in a language, the newer form becomes associated with the prototypical, basic meaning, while the old form takes a secondary meaning. This paper takes a first attempt at a more thorough inquiry of K4 to assess whether prototypicality of meaning has an effect on morphological change. Three studies on historical Dutch are taken on: -en versus -s plurals, the apocope of schwa and the apocope of -de. The effects of prototypicality are analysed both on a token level (differences in meaning within lemmas) as well as on a type level (differences between lemmas). As proxies for prototypicality of meaning (psycho)linguistic predictors are used, such as concreteness, age of acquisition, chronology of meaning, meaning frequency and metaphor. Results show no clear effect of prototypicality on a token level, but they do suggest an effect on a type level: more concrete meanings tend to show up more often with the newer variant. Yet these results may also be ascribed to iconicity as the newer variants in these cases are the shorter ones and concrete meanings tend to be represented by shorter words than abstract ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Wakeful resting and listening to music are powerful means to modulate memory. How these activities affect memory when directly compared has not been tested so far. In two experiments, participants encoded and immediately recalled two word lists followed by either 6 min wakefully resting or 6 min listening to music. The results of Experiment 1 show that both post-encoding conditions have a similar effect on memory after 1 day. In Experiment 2, we explored the possibility that less concrete words, i.e. lower in imageability than in Experiment 1, are differently affected by the two post-encoding conditions. The results of Experiment 2 show that, when words are less concrete, more words are retained after 1 day when encoding is followed by wakeful resting rather than listening to music. These findings indicate that the effects of wakeful resting and listening to music on memory consolidation are moderated by the concreteness of the encoded material.