Naming a Lego World. The Role of Language in the Acquisition of Abstract Concepts

Abstract

While embodied approaches of cognition have proved to be successful in explaining concrete concepts and words, they have more difficulties in accounting for abstract concepts and words, and several proposals have been put forward. This work aims to test the Words As Tools proposal, according to which both abstract and concrete concepts are grounded in perception, action and emotional systems, but linguistic information is more important for abstract than for concrete concept representation, due to the different ways they are acquired: while for the acquisition of the latter linguistic information might play a role, for the acquisition of the former it is instead crucial. We investigated the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts and words, and verified its impact on conceptual representation. In Experiment 1, participants explored and categorized novel concrete and abstract entities, and were taught a novel label for each category. Later they performed a categorical recognition task and an image-word matching task to verify a) whether and how the introduction of language changed the previously formed categories, b) whether language had a major weight for abstract than for concrete words representation, and c) whether this difference had consequences on bodily responses. The results confirm that, even though both concrete and abstract concepts are grounded, language facilitates the acquisition of the latter and plays a major role in their representation, resulting in faster responses with the mouth, typically associated with language production. Experiment 2 was a rating test aiming to verify whether the findings of Experiment 1 were simply due to heterogeneity, i.e. to the fact that the members of abstract categories were more heterogeneous than those of concrete categories. The results confirmed the effectiveness of our operationalization, showing that abstract concepts are more associated with the mouth and concrete ones with the hand, independently from heterogeneity.

The challenge of abstract concepts.

“…Results revealed that, with abstract words, participants who had undergone the linguistic training performed better than the other participants when they were required to respond with the mouth (microphone) in a categorical recognition task ("Do XX and YY belong to the same category?") (Granito et al, 2015). Further rating studies in which participants were asked how much different effectors were involved with action wth target words/sentences confirmed the association between abstract concepts and the mouth.…”

“…The advantage of the mouth was more pronounced when abstract concepts were introduced using not only names, but also explanations of their meaning. Further evidence supporting this principle of the Words as Social Tools (WAT) view was provided by Granito et al (2015), who replicated the mouth advantage with abstract concepts. In this study novel names and explanations of the category meaning were introduced by a researcher in order to mimic the social situation that typically characterizes conceptual acquisition.…”

Transitivity, Space, and Hand: The Spatial Grounding of Syntax

“…Participants were slower to respond to sentences with implied motion in the direction they had been moving the beans, indicating that overworked motor effectors were interfering with semantic processing. Other studies have shown that hand-and foot-based verbs modulate motor evoked potentials measured in the hands and feet, respectively (Buccino et al, 2005), that processing hand and foot action sentences differentially facilitates manual and pedal responses (Scorolli & Borghi, 2007), and that there is a benefit for responding to concrete words with the hands and abstract relations with the mouth (Granito, Scoroli, & Borghi, 2015). In addition to these motor embodiment effects, a number of studies have shown that language is also embodied in visuospatial processing (Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001;Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002;Zwaan & Yaxley, 2003).…”

Untitled

“…Consistently, previous evidence with has shown that abstract words are rated as involving the 103 mouth more than concrete words (Granito et al, 2015), and that abstract sentences referring to 104 mental states and to emotions are rated as involving the mouth more than math-related abstract 105 sentences (Ghio et al, 2013). Furthermore, behavioral evidence with response times have 106 demonstrated that responses with the mouth were facilitated with abstract compared to concrete 107 concepts in a definition-word-matching task (Borghi & Zarcone, 2016), and recent fMRI evidence 108 has shown that abstract concepts evoke the mouth motor system (Dreyer et al, 2015;Dreyer & 109 Pulvermuller, 2017).…”