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That Means Something to Me: How Linguistic and Emotional Experience Affect the Acquisition, Representation, and Processing of Novel Abstract Concepts

Authors :
Linda Espey
Marta Ghio
Christian Bellebaum
Laura Bechtold
Source :
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 2024 50(4):622-636.
Publication Year :
2024

Abstract

We used a novel linguistic training paradigm to investigate the experience-dependent acquisition, representation, and processing of novel emotional and neutral abstract concepts. Participants engaged in mental imagery (n = 32) or lexico-semantic rephrasing (n = 34) of linguistic material during five training sessions and successfully learned the novel abstract concepts. Feature production after training showed that specifically emotion features enriched the emotional concepts' representations. Unexpectedly, for participants engaging in vivid mental imagery during training a higher semantic richness of the acquired emotional concepts slowed down lexical decisions. Rephrasing, in turn, promoted a better learning and processing performance than imagery, probably due to stronger established lexical associations. Our results confirm the importance of emotional and linguistic experience and additional deep lexico-semantic processing for the acquisition, representation, and processing of abstract concepts.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
0278-7393 and 1939-1285
Volume :
50
Issue :
4
Database :
ERIC
Journal :
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Notes :
https://osf.io/gjc8p
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
EJ1420270
Document Type :
Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001236