Montefinese Maria, Visalli Antonino, Angrilli Alessandro, Ambrosini Ettore
Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
IRCCS San Camillo Hospital, Venice, Italy.
Psychophysiology. 2025 May;62(5):e70074. doi: 10.1111/psyp.70074.
People process concrete words more quickly and accurately than abstract ones-the so-called "concreteness effect." This advantage also reflects differences in how the brain processes and stores concrete versus abstract words. In this electrophysiological study, we treated word concreteness as a continuous variable and examined its effects on ERPs across three tasks with distinct processing demands (semantic, affective, grammatical). Behavioral results revealed task-dependent concreteness effects: in the semantic task, reaction times were faster for words at both concreteness extremes, and the classical linear advantage emerged for concrete words. Mass univariate ERP analyses revealed distinct spatiotemporal patterns of task-dependent concreteness effects. In the semantic task, we identified three significant clusters reflecting increased parietal N2/P3-like and sustained bilateral fronto-temporal negativity ERPs and decreased central N400-like ERP for abstract words. By contrast, the affective task elicited an increased parietal P600-like ERP for abstract words. Moreover, results from multivariate representational similarity analysis and an intersection analysis revealed that concreteness is encoded in ERP spatiotemporal patterns from 450 ms onwards, regardless of task, suggesting its role not only as an organizational principle in semantic representation, but also as a factor influencing downstream word processing and univariate ERP concreteness effects. Our findings challenge and extend existing theories like the dual coding and context availability ones, highlighting the importance of treating concreteness as a continuous variable and considering task context in word processing studies. This approach, enabled by advanced analytical techniques, provides a more nuanced understanding of how the brain processes and represents words.
人们处理具体词汇比抽象词汇更快、更准确——即所谓的“具体性效应”。这种优势还反映了大脑处理和存储具体词汇与抽象词汇方式的差异。在这项电生理学研究中，我们将词汇具体性视为一个连续变量，并在具有不同处理需求（语义、情感、语法）的三项任务中考察了其对事件相关电位（ERP）的影响。行为结果揭示了任务依赖的具体性效应：在语义任务中，处于具体性两个极端的词汇反应时间更快，并且具体词汇出现了经典的线性优势。大规模单变量ERP分析揭示了任务依赖的具体性效应的不同时空模式。在语义任务中，我们识别出三个显著的簇，反映了抽象词汇的顶叶N2/P3样和持续的双侧额颞负性ERP增强以及中央N400样ERP减弱。相比之下，情感任务中抽象词汇引发了顶叶P600样ERP增强。此外，多变量表征相似性分析和交叉分析的结果表明，无论任务如何，具体性从450毫秒起就在ERP时空模式中被编码，这表明它不仅作为语义表征中的一种组织原则，而且作为影响下游词汇处理和单变量ERP具体性效应的一个因素发挥作用。我们的发现挑战并扩展了双重编码和语境可用性等现有理论，强调了将具体性视为连续变量并在词汇处理研究中考虑任务背景的重要性。这种由先进分析技术实现的方法，为大脑如何处理和表征词汇提供了更细致入微的理解。
