Department of Psychology, Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
University of Western Ontario, Western Interdisciplinary Research Building, Room 5148, London, ON, N6A 5C2, Canada.
Psychol Res. 2022 Nov;86(8):2399-2416. doi: 10.1007/s00426-021-01484-8. Epub 2021 Jun 11.
In this article, we discuss multiple types of meaningful (semantic) relations underlying abstract (as compared to concrete) concepts. We adopt the viewpoint that words act as cues to meaning (Elman in Ment Lexicon 6(1):1-34, 2011; Lupyan and Lewis in Lang Cogn Neurosci 34(10):1319-1337, 2019), which is dependent on the dynamic contents of a comprehender's mental model of the situation. This view foregrounds the importance of both linguistic and real-world context as individuals make sense of words, flexibly access relevant knowledge, and understand described events and situations. We discuss theories of, and experimental work on, abstract concepts through the lens of the importance of thematic and other semantic relations. We then tie these findings to the sentence processing literature in which such meaningful relations within sentential contexts are often experimentally manipulated. In this literature, some specific classes/types of abstract words have been studied, although not comprehensively, and with limited connection to the literature on knowledge underlying abstract concepts reviewed herein. We conclude by arguing that the ways in which humans understand relatively more abstract concepts, in particular, can be informed by the careful study of words presented not in isolation, but rather in situational and linguistic contexts, and as a function of individual differences in knowledge, goals, and beliefs.
本文讨论了抽象（相对于具体）概念所隐含的多种有意义（语义）关系。我们采用这样一种观点，即词语是意义的线索（Elman，2011；Lupyan 和 Lewis，2019），这取决于理解者对情景的心理模型的动态内容。这种观点突出了语言和现实世界语境的重要性，因为个体需要通过语境来理解词语，灵活地获取相关知识，并理解所描述的事件和情景。我们通过主题和其他语义关系的重要性这一视角来讨论抽象概念的理论和实验工作。然后，我们将这些发现与句子处理文献联系起来，在该文献中，句子语境中的这些有意义的关系通常是通过实验来操纵的。在这一文献中，已经研究了某些特定类型的抽象词，但不够全面，而且与本文所综述的关于抽象概念基础的知识文献的联系也很有限。最后，我们认为，可以通过仔细研究在情境和语言语境中呈现的词语，而不是孤立地研究词语，以及考虑个体知识、目标和信念的差异，来了解人类如何理解相对更抽象的概念。
