This is the main reason for the development of language to be able to express oneself in a manner that can be understood easily. Abstract and Concrete are two concepts that are related to language and are most commonly used in Linguistics and Semantics. Abstract is often considered as a noun or a concept. However, both refer to similar things and is easy to understand. Abstract nouns are taught at a younger age to kids and abstract concepts are mostly covered in college level classes and are used to dive deeper into understand language.
These concepts or nouns are intangible and cannot be touched, but instead only understood. Italian; for a similar result see Paivio, : differently from us, in a learning and recall task he contrasted only abstract and concrete nouns, rather than sentences. The third result is the marginally significant interaction we found between Language and kind of Verb. Integrating the last two findings, it seems that the abstractness vs. Let us now consider results from RTs together, integrating them with the results obtained from the ratings of the materials.
We will discuss how each theory could account for them and the problems each theory faces. We will also provide a possible neuroanatomical explanation of the results. According to both a amodal e. Therefore, for both amodal and modal views we should expect no difference between the four conditions, unless these differences are explained by association degree and familiarity for amodal theories, and by imageability for modal theories.
Therefore, the advantage of congruent over mixed sentences should be due to a higher association rate of these pairs compared to that of the mixed combinations. To check for this possibility, we calculated the familiarity and the probability of use score averages in each condition for the pairs selected for the behavioral experiment.
Ratings showed that, for both German and Italian participants, the advantage of congruent combinations over the mixed pairs is not explained by a supposed higher familiarity or higher probability of use of the first.
An approach based more on metaphors Lakoff, should account for the behavioral results considering the literality ratings that indirectly give us information on the degree of metaphoricity. Actually the advantage for the Concrete Verb — Concrete Noun combination can be explained resting on its high imageability, low metaphoricity rate, and precocious age of acquisition.
But neither the modal theory nor the approach based on metaphors was verified by our results on Abstract Verb — Abstract Noun pairs, which were neither imageable nor literal as opposed to being metaphorical but provoked a response that was as fast as that for Concrete Verb—Concrete Noun pairs.
Finally, an approach proposing that words are grounded in perceptual and especially in motor systems Glenberg, would predict a relationship between the behavioral data and the quantity of motion scores. This was not the case, however, as the amount of movement evoked by the sentence did not explain the pattern of results with RT.
Therefore, we can conclude that neither a strictly amodal nor a strictly modal theory adequately accounts for our results. Theories based on multiple types of representation — both in their non-embodied vs.
The interpretation that better accommodates our results assumes that abstract words are processed predominantly in the language system and concrete words are processed in the sensorimotor system to a larger extent. If processing occurs in separate systems, then the switching between concrete and abstract would imply not only conceptual costs, but also costs connected with switching between anatomical systems working in parallel.
Within each system concrete—concrete vs. Some recent pieces of evidence are in line with our results. Motor verbs produced greater signal changes than abstract verbs in several regions within the posterior premotor, primary motor M1 , and somatosensory S1 cortices, as well as in secondary somatosensory S2 cortex. More crucially, our interpretation is also consistent with results obtained in a brain imaging study performed using the same paradigm as the one used in the present work Menz et al.
In case of abstract verb plus abstract noun combinations, instead, there was a stronger engagement of the supramarginal gyrus SMG — typically involved in motor planning e. The advantage of non-mixed combinations AA and CC on the mixed ones AC and CA rules out the No difference views but can be accounted by both the Non-embodied 2 and the Embodied versions of multiple representations views 3. In order to disentangle them, the most critical result is the advantage we found when the first word was a concrete one.
A Non-embodied multiple representation view 2 has difficulties in explaining this result: since the task used in the present study is a linguistic one, it should be easier to process first words which activate linguistic information, i. However, the explanation based on LASS would be a posteriori.
The argument would be that, even if the task is a linguistic one, it requires deep semantic processing, and this might require more time for abstract than for concrete words. A more straightforward explanation of the longer RTs when the first word is an abstract rather than a concrete one derives from the WAT proposal. WAT assumes that both linguistic and sensorimotor processing have the same status — coherent with the advantage of the AA and CC pairs on the mixed pairs —, and it treats the issue of concepts representation as strictly related to their acquisition, stressing the different function of linguistic label for concrete vs.
So the advantage of concrete words when presented first would be due to the fact that abstract words are learnt differently from concrete ones, and often with the help of a verbal explanation see Borghi et al. It follows that for the acquisition of abstract terms the social experience due to the presence of others explaining to us specific word meanings is particularly crucial. Conversely German and Italian participants showed different patterns as far as Metaphoricity and Quantity of Motion ratings are concerned, thus they were differently influenced by the specific linguistic milieu.
The results of our behavioral study showed that participants were faster with congruent combinations, and that with mixed combinations they were faster when the first word was a concrete one, independently of the spoken language and of the word grammatical class. Results are in line with those embodied views, such as LASS and WAT, according to which both linguistic and perception and action experience play a role in accounting for word representation.
The WAT proposal is able to explain the advantage of the first concrete word better than the LASS view, ascribing it to the fact that abstract words require more time as a consequence of their peculiar acquisition modality. Our results have a variety of implications as to how concrete and abstract words are represented in the brain, as they suggest that linguistic and perception and action information are differently distributed in accounting for concrete and abstract meanings.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Aziz-Zadeh, L.
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Brain Lang. Desai, R. Activation of sensory-motor areas in sentence comprehension. It is primarily used as the subject in a sentence, or as the object of a particular action or verb. However, what most readers find more difficult, is separating abstract from concrete nouns. Well, once you see examples of an abstract or a concrete noun, it will be easier to discuss their differences. But first, concrete nouns are those nouns that can be seen or perceived by the senses.
If you can see it, feel it, taste it, hear it or smell it, then that thing is most likely something that can be regarded as concrete. They are those that are described as tangible. Hence, it can be a person, a location, an object or any other tangible matter. On the contrary, abstract nouns from the term itself are those that pertain to other things that are not readily observed or perceived by the human senses. However, the other student who failed to be awarded was enveloped with envy. All of the living and nonliving physical objects in the universe are referred to by concrete nouns.
Abstract nouns are used to refer to everything else. Intangible things that exist as ideas or concepts are referred to by abstract nouns. Words like sadness , agility, philosophy, and ambitions are all abstract nouns. Of the two, concrete nouns are more common and are, generally, easier to understand.
If you can use any of your five senses to interact with something, that something will be referred to by a concrete noun. Although you cannot see air, you can still feel it and so the word air is a concrete noun. Even extremely small things like bacteria and atoms use concrete nouns.
Fictional or imaginary people, places, and things are also often referred to by concrete nouns. For example, the words Godzilla , Narnia, and fairy are all concrete nouns. Obviously, none of these things actually exist—sorry, Godzilla fans! However, as the logic goes you know how grammarians love their logic , they would all have a physical form if they did exist, and so we refer to these things using concrete nouns. Concrete nouns are numerous and extremely common. Many of the other types of nouns are also concrete nouns.
This means that concrete nouns may also be singular nouns or plural nouns. They may be common nouns or proper nouns. They may be collective nouns, countable nouns, or uncountable nouns. You can see how diverse concrete nouns are by checking out these examples:.
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