Semantic Size of Abstract Concepts: It Gets Emotional When You Can’t See It

Abstract

Size is an important visuo-spatial characteristic of the physical world. In language processing, previous research has demonstrated a processing advantage for words denoting semantically “big” (e.g., jungle) versus “small” (e.g., needle) concrete objects. We investigated whether semantic size plays a role in the recognition of words expressing abstract concepts (e.g., truth). Semantically “big” and “small” concrete and abstract words were presented in a lexical decision task. Responses to “big” words, regardless of their concreteness, were faster than those to “small” words. Critically, we explored the relationship between semantic size and affective characteristics of words as well as their influence on lexical access. Although a word’s semantic size was correlated with its emotional arousal, the temporal locus of arousal effects may depend on the level of concreteness. That is, arousal seemed to have an earlier (lexical) effect on abstract words, but a later (post-lexical) effect on concrete words. Our findings provide novel insights into the semantic representations of size in abstract concepts and highlight that affective attributes of words may not always index lexical access.

The Glasgow Norms: Ratings of 5,500 words on 9 scales

“…Correlations between the 9 dimensions of the Glasgow Norms were generally significant (see Table 5 Bradley & Lang, 1999;Friendly et al, 1982;Gilhooly & Logie, 1980;Paivio et al, 1968;Stadthagen-Gonzalez & Davis, 2006;Toglia & Battig, 1978;Warriner et al, 2013). The latter is a novel finding, although it has already obtained behavioral support (Yao et al, 2013). In further analyses, we fit linear and quadratic models for all combinations of the dimensions (see Tables S1 and S2, Supplementary Materials).…”

“…Alternatively, researchers have frequently gathered local ratings on their stimuli to insure the validity of the lexical dimension(s) of interest (e.g., Altarriba, Bauer, & Benvenuto, 1999;Juhasz & Rayner, 2003;Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2009;Yao et al, 2013Yao et al, , 2017. In other cases, the dimension of interest, although pertinent to the study, is one that is either not widely employed or well-established.…”

“…CNC represents the degree to which something can be experienced by our senses (concrete, abstract). Concrete words are typically recognized faster than abstract words (e.g., Juhasz & Rayner, 2003;Schwanenflugel et al, 1988;Whaley, 1978;Yao et al, 2013Yao et al, , 2017. Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (2011), however, proposed that abstract words tend to be more emotionally valenced than concrete words which gives rise to a residual processing advantage of abstract over concrete words, critically, once opposing effects of context availability and imageability are controlled.…”

“…The final dimensions of SIZE and GEND have only been the subject of more recent psycholinguistic investigations (e.g., Yao et al, 2013).…”

“…It has been demonstrated that words referring to bigger things are recognized faster than those referring to smaller ones (e.g., Yao et al, 2013). GEND is a measure of the degree to which words are considered to be associated with male or female behavior (masculine, feminine).…”