Happiness is… an abstract word: The role of affect in abstract knowledge representation

Happiness is… an Abstract Word The role of affect in abstract knowledge representation Stavroula-Thaleia Kousta (s.kousta@ucl.ac.uk) Gabriella Vigliocco (g.vigliocco@ucl.ac.uk) David P. Vinson d.vinson@ucl.ac.uk Mark Andrews (m.andrews@ucl.ac.uk) Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK Abstract Although the ability to communicate through language about abstract concepts lies at the heart of what it means to be human, our knowledge of how abstract word meanings are represented and processed is extremely limited. In this paper we show that neither of the two dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain differences between concrete and abstract words fully captures processing (and hence representational) differences between the two types of word meaning. Using lexical decision data, we show that this is, at least partly, because in both accounts abstract words are considered to be unrelated to experiential information. We show instead that there is one type of experiential information, namely affective information, which plays a crucial role in the processing and representation of abstract concepts: affect explains a residual advantage for abstract words, when variables such as imageability and rated context availability are held constant. We discuss our results with respect to embodied theories of cognition and language representation. Keywords: abstract words; semantics; emotional valence; concreteness; imageability; semantic memory. Introduction Concreteness indexes a basic ontological distinction, divid- ing entities into two basic kinds: concrete entities, which exist in space-time and are independent of human minds/language, and abstract entities, which do not exist in space-time but whose existence depends on human minds/language (Hale, 1988). The ability to communicate through language about abstract concepts, such as courage, dignity, revenge, lies at the heart of what it means to be human. However, up to now, research into semantic and conceptual representation has focused almost exclusively on how concrete word meanings and concepts are represented and processed, to the exclusion of abstract meanings and concepts. No theory of semantic or conceptual representa- tion is complete without an explicit account of how abstract knowledge is acquired, represented, and processed. In this paper we present and assess a working hypothesis of how the semantic system is organized with respect to the distinction between concrete and abstract concepts, by proposing that concrete and abstract semantic representa- tions differ in terms of the types of information they bind: sensory, motor, affective, and linguistic (how words are distributed in texts and syntactic information; see Andrews, Vigliocco, & Vinson, in press). The originality of our pro- posal lies in demonstrating that emotional content, a largely neglected (in the semantic representation/processing litera- ture) type of experiential information, crucially contributes to the representation and processing of abstract concepts. It has been demonstrated repeatedly, for example, using lexical decision (e.g., James, 1975; Whaley, 1978; Rubin, 1980) and word naming tasks (de Groot, 1989; Schwanenflugel and Stowe, 1989), that concrete words have a cognitive advantage over abstract words—an advantage that has been termed the ‘concreteness effect’. Among the handful of proposals that have been put forward to explain this effect, two have been particularly influential: dual coding theory (Paivio, 1971; 1986; 2007) and the context availability model (Schwanenflugel and Shoben, 1983; Schwanenflugel, 1991). According to dual coding theory, concrete words are represented in two representationally distinct but functionally related systems: a verbal, linguistic system and a non-verbal, imagistic system. Abstract concepts, on the other hand, are primarily or exclusively represented in the verbal system. The cognitive advantage for words referring to concrete concepts is attributed to the fact that they have access to information from multiple systems. According to the context availability model, both concrete and abstract concepts are represented in a single verbal code and neither the representations nor the processes that operate on these representations differ for the two types of concepts. The argument here is that comprehension relies on verbal context (either supplied by the discourse or by the comprehender’s own semantic memory) in order to be effective. Accessing the meaning of a word involves accessing a network of associated semantic information, and the advantage for concrete words arises because they have stronger and denser associations with contextual knowledge than abstract words. In both of these accounts, concrete word representations are assumed to be richer than abstract word representations (see also Plaut & Shallice, 1993). These two proposals have guided research on concrete/abstract semantics in the last fifteen years or so; results, however, have been inconclusive (for imaging studies, for example, see Sabsevitz, Medler, Seidenberg & Binder, 2005).