The contributions of language and experience to the representation of abstract and concrete words: Different weights but similar organizations

In the present studies, we evaluated the contributions of language and sensorimotor information to the representation of abstract and concrete words and the possibility that the organizations of the two types of concepts follow different organizational principles: association, for abstract concepts, and semantic similarity, for concrete concepts. In Study 1, we examined the two strongest associates of concrete and abstract words from published free association norms. Study 2 then extended this analysis to individual data collected with a free association task. Language associations were more important for abstract than for concrete words, but for sensorimotor information no differences were observed between the two types of concepts. Also, no clear evidence was found for different qualitative organizational principles for abstract and concrete concepts. Multiple representational systems thus seem to be engaged in the conceptual processing of abstract and concrete concepts, while it remains to be investigated whether their representations follow different organizational principles.