The Concreteness Effect is independent of visual experience
(2018) Rovereto Workshop on Concepts, Actions, and Objects (CAOs) — Location: Rovereto - Italy (3.May.2018)
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- Abstract
- Abstract words are typically more difficult to identify than concrete words in lexical decision, word naming and recall tasks. This behavioral advantage for concrete over abstract words is known as concreteness effect. This phenomenon has traditionally been taken as evidence in favor of an embodied view of lexical semantics, which emphasizes the role of sensorimotor experience in the comprehension of word meaning. Under this view, on-line sensorimotor simulations triggered by concrete words, but not by abstract words, facilitate the access to words meaning and speed up words identification. To test whether perceptual simulation is the driving force underlying the concreteness effect, we compared data from early blind and sighted individuals performing an auditory lexical decision task. Subjects were presented with property words referring to abstract (e.g. logic), concrete multimodal (e.g. sweet) and concrete unimodal visual (e.g. blue) concepts. According to the embodied account, the processing advantage for concrete unimodal visual words should disappear in the early blinds, as they cannot rely on visual experience during semantics processing (i.e. purely visual words should be abstract for blind people). Surprisingly, we found that both sighted and blind individuals are faster when processing multimodal and unimodal visual words compared to abstract words. This result suggests that the concreteness effect is not necessarily dependent on perceptual simulations but might be driven by modality-independent properties of word meaning.
- Affiliations
Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language University of Trento Centre for Mind/ Brain CIMeC International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA)
Citations
Morucci, P. M., Barilari, M., Collignon, O., Crepaldi, D., & Bottini, R. (2018). The Concreteness Effect is independent of visual experience. Rovereto Workshop on Concepts, Actions, and Objects (CAOs), Rovereto - Italy. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100461