Lamarra Tommaso, Villani Caterina, Bolognesi Marianna M
Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Bologna, Via Cartoleria, 5, Bologna, Italy.
Cogn Process. 2025 Sep 3. doi: 10.1007/s10339-025-01286-5.
Concrete concepts (banana) are processed faster and more accurately than abstract ones (belief). This phenomenon, supported by empirical studies, is known as the concreteness effect. However, recent research indicates that controlling certain psycholinguistic variables can mitigate or reverse this effect. We introduce a previously neglected variable, namely categorical specificity, and investigate its role in lexical and semantic access, through: ratings, a lexical decision task and a semantic decision task. Our findings confirm the processing advantage of concrete over abstract concepts (concreteness effect) and reveal a similar advantage for specific over general concepts (specificity effect). We also report a non-significant interaction between the two variables. We discuss the results within the general framework of conceptual abstraction.
具体概念（如香蕉）的处理速度比抽象概念（如信念）更快且更准确。这一现象得到了实证研究的支持，被称为具体性效应。然而，最近的研究表明，控制某些心理语言学变量可以减轻或逆转这种效应。我们引入了一个先前被忽视的变量，即类别特异性，并通过评分、词汇判断任务和语义判断任务来研究其在词汇和语义通达中的作用。我们的研究结果证实了具体概念相对于抽象概念的处理优势（具体性效应），并揭示了特定概念相对于一般概念的类似优势（特异性效应）。我们还报告了这两个变量之间的非显著交互作用。我们在概念抽象的总体框架内讨论了这些结果。
