School of Psychology and Counselling, Faculty of Health, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059, Australia.
School of Clinical Sciences, Centre for Biomedical Technologies, QUT, Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059, Australia; Herston Imaging Research Facility, Royal Brisbane & Women's Hospital, Herston, QLD 4029, Australia.
Cognition. 2025 Jan;254:105972. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105972. Epub 2024 Oct 9.
How do we represent and process abstract and concrete concepts? The "concreteness effect", in which words with more concrete meanings are processed more quickly and accurately across a range of language tasks compared to abstract ones, suggests a differential conceptual organization of these words in the brain. However, concrete words tend to be marked by specific phonotactic features, such as having fewer syllables and more phonological neighbours. It is unclear whether these non-arbitrary form-meaning relationships that systematically denote the concreteness of a word impact language processing. In the current study, we first establish the extent of systematic mappings between phonological/phonetic features and concreteness ratings in a large set of monosyllabic and polysyllabic English words (i.e., concreteness form typicality), then demonstrate that they significantly influence lexical processing using behavioural megastudy datasets. Surface form features predicted a significant proportion of variance in concreteness ratings of monomorphemic words (25 %) which increased with the addition of polymorphemic forms (43 %). In addition, concreteness form typicality was a significant predictor of performance on visual and auditory lexical decision, naming, and semantic (concrete/abstract) decision tasks, after controlling for a range of psycholinguistic variables and concreteness ratings. Overall, our results provide the first evidence that concreteness form typicality influences lexical processing. We discuss theoretical implications for interpretations of the concreteness effect and models of language processing that have yet to incorporate non-arbitrary relationships between form and meaning into their feature sets.
我们如何表示和处理抽象和具体的概念？“具体性效应”表明，与抽象概念相比，具有更具体含义的词汇在各种语言任务中的处理速度更快、更准确。这表明这些词汇在大脑中的概念组织存在差异。然而，具体词汇往往具有特定的语音特征，例如音节较少、语音邻居较多。目前还不清楚这些非任意的形式-意义关系是否会影响语言处理，这些关系系统地表示单词的具体性。在目前的研究中，我们首先在大量的单音节和多音节英语单词中建立了语音/音位特征与具体性评价之间的系统映射关系（即具体性形式典型性），然后使用行为大数据集证明它们会显著影响词汇处理。表面形式特征可以预测单语素词具体性评价的很大一部分方差（25%），而多语素形式的加入则会增加这一比例（43%）。此外，在控制了一系列心理语言变量和具体性评价后，具体性形式典型性仍然是视觉和听觉词汇判断、命名和语义（具体/抽象）判断任务表现的重要预测指标。总体而言，我们的研究结果首次提供了具体性形式典型性会影响词汇处理的证据。我们讨论了对具体性效应的解释以及语言处理模型的理论意义，这些模型尚未将形式与意义之间的非任意关系纳入其特征集。
