How well do similarity measures predict priming in abstract and concrete concepts?

Abstract

Models of semantic representation predict that automatic priming is determined by associative and co-occurrence relations (i.e., spreading activation accounts), or to similarity in words' semantic features (i.e., featural models). Although, these three factors are correlated in characterizing semantic representation, they seem to tap different aspects of meaning. We designed two lexical decision experiments to dissociate these three different types of meaning similarity. For unmasked primes, we observed priming only due to association strength and not the other two measures; and no evidence for differences in priming for concrete and abstract concepts. For masked primes there was no priming regardless of the semantic relation. These results challenge theoretical accounts of automatic priming. Rather, they are in line with the idea that priming may be due to participants’ controlled strategic processes. These results provide important insight about the nature of priming and how association strength, as determined from word-association norms, relates to the nature of semantic representation.

How Continuous Concreteness Shapes Brain Processing and Concept Representation Across Diverse Tasks: Insights from an ERP Study

“…These results also hint at the possibility that abstract and concrete words may have distinct organisational patterns in the brain, reflecting varying degrees of similarity in their meanings (Montefinese, 2019). However, it is worth noting that behavioural and neuroimaging studies adopting Representational Similarity Analysis 1 (RSA; have not provided unequivocal support for a specific dimension of similarity governing the semantic organisation of abstract and concrete words (Crutch & Warrington, 2005;Meersmans et al, 2020;Montefinese, Pinti, et al, 2021;Montefinese et al, 2024). Electroencephalography (EEG), with a special focus on the event-related potential (ERP) technique, stands as an invaluable tool for investigating the nuanced distinctions in how abstract and concrete words are processed, largely owing to its exceptional temporal precision.…”

CONcreTEXT norms: Concreteness ratings for Italian and English words in context

“…These results could also suggest that semantic representations of abstract and concrete words may be organized according to different dimensions of relation/ similarity, which roughly measure the degree to which two words are similar in their meaning [8]. Although abstract words are generally organized by associative relations, concrete words are deemed to be organized by similarity in the sensorimotor experience [9,[17][18][19]. Surprisingly, the behavior of distributional models (based on the co-occurrence between words in spoken and written language) was largely comparable between concrete and abstract words [20] or accounts better for concrete than abstract words [21,22].…”

“…Concrete words are also easier to contextualize, while abstract words tend to be more emotionally valenced and less imageable [7]. Furthermore, abstract words are considerably more variable and not organized into a well-defined categorical hierarchy [3,8,9]. Participants' agreement is higher when they produce properties and associations for concrete words compared to abstract words [10].…”

Inferior parietal lobule is sensitive to different semantic similarity relations for concrete and abstract words

“…Relative effects of different theory‐based similarity measures in predicting the participants’ performance in different semantic tasks (such as, for example, lexical decision, Brunellière et al, 2017; Heyman et al., 2015; Montefinese, Buchanan, et al., 2018; Vigliocco et al., 2004) may also vary depending on concept concreteness: the degree to which a concept denoted by a word refers to an entity that can be perceived through the senses (Brysbaert et al, 2014). This dimension is usually assessed by participants on Likert scales, in which concrete concepts lie on one side of the scale, referring to single, bounded, identifiable referents that can be perceived through the senses (Borghi et al., 2017).…”