Mahmood Faris, Muraki Emiko J, Diveica Veronica, Binney Richard J, Protzner Andrea B, Pexman Penny M
Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada.
Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Quebec, Canada.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Jun 24. doi: 10.3758/s13423-025-02719-0.
Theories of language and conceptual development have proposed that social relevance is helpful for understanding and acquiring the meanings of abstract words. However, there have been few direct tests of these relationships. In the present study, we used a newly quantified measure of word socialness, alongside word concreteness and valence ratings, to determine if children acquire more social abstract words earlier than less social abstract words. Our analysis included 4,047 words and examined the relationships among word socialness, valence, concreteness, and frequency in relation to age of acquisition ratings and, separately, test-based age of acquisition. We found that socialness significantly predicted age of acquisition, facilitating learning of abstract words more than concrete words. However, this greater benefit to abstract words was diminished when accounting for emotional valence. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between socialness and valence, which suggests there may be subsets of highly social and emotional words that are earlier acquired, regardless of concreteness. Our findings highlight the importance of socialness in word learning and underscore the necessity for a more nuanced examination of social concept subtypes to fully understand its facilitatory role in abstract word acquisition.
语言和概念发展理论提出，社会关联性有助于理解和习得抽象词汇的含义。然而，对这些关系的直接测试却很少。在本研究中，我们使用了一种新的词汇社会性量化指标，以及词汇具体性和效价评级，来确定儿童是否更早习得社会性更强的抽象词汇，而非社会性较弱的抽象词汇。我们的分析涵盖了4047个单词，并考察了词汇社会性、效价、具体性和频率与习得年龄评级之间的关系，以及与基于测试的习得年龄之间的关系。我们发现，社会性显著预测了习得年龄，相比于具体词汇，它对抽象词汇学习的促进作用更大。然而，在考虑情感效价时，这种对抽象词汇的更大益处就减弱了。此外，社会性和效价之间存在显著的交互作用，这表明可能存在一些高度社会性和情感性的词汇子集，无论其具体性如何，都会更早被习得。我们的研究结果凸显了社会性在词汇学习中的重要性，并强调有必要对社会概念子类型进行更细致入微的考察，以全面理解其在抽象词汇习得中的促进作用。
