The representation of abstract words: why emotion matters

Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this article we first address the adequacy of the 2 dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. We find that neither proposal can account for experimental findings and that this is, at least partly, because abstract words are considered to be unrelated to experiential information in both of these accounts. We then address a particular type of experiential information, emotional content, and demonstrate that it plays a crucial role in the processing and representation of abstract concepts: Statistically, abstract words are more emotionally valenced than are concrete words, and this accounts for a residual latency advantage for abstract words, when variables such as imageability (a construct derived from dual coding theory) and rated context availability are held constant. We conclude with a discussion of our novel hypothesis for embodied abstract semantics.     

Investigating linguistic relativity through bilingualism: the case of grammatical gender

The authors investigated linguistic relativity effects by examining the semantic effects of grammatical gender (present in Italian but absent in English) in fluent bilingual speakers as compared with monolingual speakers. In an error-induction experiment, they used responses by monolingual speakers to establish a baseline for bilingual speakers and show that gender affects the semantic substitution errors made by monolingual Italian speakers compared with monolingual English speakers. They then showed that Italian-English bilingual speakers behave like monolingual English speakers when the task is in English and like monolingual Italian speakers when the task is in Italian, hence exhibiting appropriate semantic representations for each language. These results show that for bilingual speakers there is intraspeaker relativity in semantic representations and, therefore, that gender does not have a conceptual, nonlinguistic effect. The results also have implications for models of bilingual semantic memory and processing.     

Emotion words, regardless of polarity, have a processing advantage over neutral words

Despite increasing interest in the interface between emotion and cognition, the role of emotion in cognitive tasks is unclear. According to one hypothesis, negative valence is more relevant for survival and is associated with a general slowdown of the processing of stimuli, due to a defense mechanism that freezes activity in the face of threat. According to a different hypothesis which does not posit a privileged role for the aversive system, valence, regardless of polarity, facilitates processing due to the relevance of both negative and positive stimuli for survival and for the attainment of goals. Here, we present evidence that emotional valence has an overall facilitatory role in the processing of verbal stimuli, providing support for the latter hypothesis. We found no asymmetry between negative and positive words and suggest that previous findings of such an asymmetry can be attributed to failure to control for a number of critical lexical variables and to a sampling bias.