Concepts develop for many aspects of experience, including abstract internal states and abstract social activities that do not refer to concrete entities in the world. The current study assessed the hypothesis that, like concrete concepts, distributed neural patterns of relevant nonlinguistic semantic content represent the meanings of abstract concepts. In a novel neuroimaging paradigm, partici...

Concepts The element at the head of the list is referred to as the abstract concept, k Abst , and its level name is Abst , abstract. The abstract concept’s definitions, D, and mapping KB K E , ( ) , where = K k0...kn { } and , = E ki k j , ( ) i j ≠ , i j , 0...n ∈ { } = Examples and Figures We will use a running example of the concept of unsigned binary addition . This example will show the ab...

Today the syntax of many languages is defined by using context-free grammars. These syntax definitions suffer from a major drawback: grammars do not allow the definition of abstract, reusable concept definitions. Especially in families of related languages, where multiple languages often share the same concepts, this limitation leads to unnecessary reproduction of concept definitions and a miss...