Natural languages are rife with words that describe feelings, introspective states, and social constructs (e.g., liberty, persuasion) that cannot be directly observed through the senses. Effective communication demands linguistic competence with such abstract words. In clinical neurological settings, abstract words are especially vulnerable to the effects of stroke and neurodegenerative conditi...

There are a number of long-standing theories on how the cognitive processing of abstract words, like 'life', differs from that of concrete words, like 'knife'. This review considers current perspectives on this debate, focusing particularly on insights obtained from patients with language disorders and integrating these with evidence from functional neuroimaging studies. The evidence supports t...

Two experiments are reported that investigated the effect of concreteness on the ability to generate words to fit sentence contexts. When participants attempted to retrieve words from dictionary definitions in experiment 1, abstract words were associated with more omissions and more alternates than were concrete words. These findings are consistent with the view that the semantic-lexical weight...

Word Deficits in Aphasia: Evidence From Semantic Priming L. K. Tyler, H. E. Moss, and F. Jennings Birkbeck College, University of London J.G. and D.E. are nonfluent aphasic patients who appear to have selective problems with abstract words on a variety of standard tests. Such a pattern would normally be interpreted as indicating a central semantic deficit for abstract words. The authors show th...

words is governed by the distributional principle. Words that frequently occur in the same contexts come to have similar semantic representations because they generate similar predictions. 3. The units in the hub make no strong distinction between concrete and abstract words. Concrete and abstract words can be represented as similar to one another if they occur in similar contexts (e.g., journe...

On the basis of previous studies revealing a processing advantage of concrete words over abstract words, the current study aimed to further explore the influence of concreteness on the integration of novel words into semantic memory with the event related potential (ERP) technique. In the experiment during the learning phase participants read two-sentence contexts and inferred the meaning of no...

Relative to abstract words, concrete words typically elicit faster response times and larger N400 and N700 event-related potential (ERP) brain responses. These effects have been interpreted as reflecting the denser links to associated semantic information of concrete words and their recruitment of visual imagery processes. Here, we examined whether there are ERP differences between concrete and...

Concrete words are more quickly recognized than abstract words (Bransford & McCarrell, 1974; Paivio, 1986). Different theories of semantic processing argue that either there are more brain areas that process concrete than abstract words (bilateral versus unilateral; Paivio, 1986), or that the same brain areas process both kinds but that concrete words have more context associated with them (Bra...

In this paper we investigate possibility of using phrases of flexible length in genre classification of textual documents as an extension to classic bag of words document representation where documents are represented using single words as features. The investigation is conducted on collection of articles from document database collected from three different sources representing different genre...

Words representing concrete concepts are processed more quickly and efficiently than words representing abstract concepts. Concreteness effects have also been observed in studies using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The aim of this study was to examine concrete and abstract words using both reaction time (RT) and ERP measurements to determine (1) at what point in the stream of cognitive...