Concrete vs. Abstract Semantics: From Mental Representations to Functional Brain Mapping

Abstract

The nature of abstract and concrete semantics and differences between them have remained a debated issue in psycholinguistic and cognitive studies for decades. Most of the available behavioral and neuroimaging studies reveal distinctions between these two types of semantics, typically associated with a so-called “concreteness effect.” Many attempts have been made to explain these differences using various approaches, from purely theoretical linguistic and cognitive frameworks to neuroimaging experiments. In this brief overview, we will try to provide a snapshot of these diverse views and relationships between them and highlight the crucial issues preventing this problem from being solved. We will argue that one potentially beneficial way forward is to identify the neural mechanisms underpinning acquisition of the different types of semantics (e.g., by using neurostimulation techniques to establish causal relationships), which may help explain the distinctions found between the processing of concrete and abstract semantics.

Expert Programmers Have Fine-Tuned Cortical Representations of Source Code

“…category) are represented in the left MTG/IT. Further, Mkrtychian et al have associated STG, MTG, and IFG with the processing of abstract concepts in their review on concreteness effects (Mkrtychian et al, 2019), implying that representations in these three regions could reflect relative differences in abstractness between the category and subcategory in our study. These interpretations might suggest a hypothesis that an expert programmer's brain has a hierarchical semantic processing system to obtain mental representations of source code for multiple levels of abstraction.…”

Words have a weight: language as a source of inner grounding and flexibility in abstract concepts

“…Subregions of these areas have been linked to the language system: the left superior ATL has been linked to high-level speech perception and sentence comprehension (Hickok & Poeppel, 2004Humphries et al, 2006;Vandenberghe, Nobre, & Price, 2002) and the left IFG (which includes Broca's area) has been linked to several types of language processing, including auditory-verbal short-term memory, and the retrieval and selection of semantic knowledge (Badre & Wagner, 2007;Jeffries & Lambon Ralph, 2006;Thompson-Schill, 2003). Admittedly, this is all somewhat preliminary: not only are the neuroimaging results variable (Binder, 2007;Mkrtychian et al, 2019), but an argument can be made that a more fine-grained accounting of the neural circuits involved in processing concrete and abstract concepts is needed (Montefinese, 2019).…”

Corroborating behavioral evidence for the interplay of representational richness and semantic control in semantic word processing

“…Concrete words (e.g., butterfly, train) show a processing advantage compared to abstract words (e.g., wisdom, tolerance). This so-called concreteness effect 1 , 2 (CE) emerged in tasks requiring recall, comprehension and recognition of concrete and abstract words 3 , 4 . Theoretical approaches explained this processing advantage as due to differences regarding the information comprised in the conceptual representations of concrete and abstract word meanings.…”