Defining A Conceptual Topography Of Word Concreteness: Clustering Properties Of Emotion, Sensation, And Magnitude Among 750 English Words

Keywords

Concrete-abstract; Lexical-semantic; Multidimensional scaling; Semantic memory; Word concreteness effect

Abstract

Cognitive science has a longstanding interest in the ways that people acquire and use abstract vs. concrete words (e.g., truth vs. piano). One dominant theory holds that abstract and concrete words are subserved by two parallel semantic systems. We recently proposed an alternative account of abstract-concrete word representation premised upon a unitary, high dimensional semantic space wherein word meaning is nested. We hypothesize that a range of cognitive and perceptual dimensions (e.g., emotion, time, space, color, size, visual form) bound this space, forming a conceptual topography. Here we report a normative study where we examined the clustering properties of a sample of English words (N = 750) spanning a spectrum of concreteness in a continuous manner from highly abstract to highly concrete. Participants (N = 328) rated each target word on a range of 14 cognitive dimensions (e.g., color, emotion, valence, polarity, motion, space). The dimensions reduced to three factors: Endogenous factor, Exogenous factor, and Magnitude factor. Concepts were plotted in a unified, multimodal space with concrete and abstract concepts along a continuous continuum. We discuss theoretical implications and practical applications of this dataset.

Publication Date

10-11-2017

Publication Title

Frontiers in Psychology

Volume

8

Issue

OCT

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01787

Socpus ID

85046505348 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85046505348

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