FINAL CONFERENCE

Abstraction, a hallmark of human cognition, can be broadly defined as the ability to form general concepts or ideas by identifying similarities and recurring patterns across direct experiences, linguistic input, or existing conceptual representations (Reilly et al., 2025). Although concepts can be represented independently of words, linguistic labels provide powerful cues that facilitate the formation, organization, and alignment of knowledge into coherent categories (Mauri, 2021; Rissman & Lupyan, 2024).

Despite its central role in cognition and communication, abstraction remains a multifaceted phenomenon, approached from different theoretical perspectives and investigated across disciplines through diverse methods and metrics (Montefinese et al., 2023; Ravelli et al., 2024; Villani & Bolognesi, 2026). Questions about abstraction are fundamental to understanding how we learn (Rozic & Vigliocco, 2026), categorize (Masini et al., 2018; Borghi, 2023), reason (Winter, 2023), communicate (Vossen et al., 2018), and create (Veale et al., 2022; Rambelli et al., 2024), making it a shared concern across the cognitive sciences and an increasingly relevant topic in debates on artificial intelligence.

The final conference of the ERC-funded project “ABSTRACTION – Unlocking Meaning from Experience through Language” will bring together researchers from different disciplines to explore abstraction in thought, in language (Occhipinti et al., 2026), and in creativity (Bolognesi & Vernillo, in press). The project investigates the relationship between experience, language, and meaning, starting from the observation that words do not simply label categories formed through perception but can actively shape them. While reflecting the project’s main research interests, the conference aims to open a space for dialogue among theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives and to explore the plurality of processes and phenomena associated with abstraction.

We invite researchers from all disciplines and at all career stages, including PhD candidates and early-career scholars, to submit posters presenting theoretical, empirical, methodological, or applied work. Contributions may address abstraction directly or investigate related phenomena that can shed new light on its nature and manifestations.

 

Key Dates

Submission deadline: December 20, 2026

Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2027

Registration deadline: March 15, 2027

Conference: April 29–30, 2027

 

Submission Guidelines

Format: poster

Language: English

Abstract length: up to 400 words, including references

Submission: abstract shall be submitted as pdf attachments to tbd

 

Organizing Committee: 

Marianna Bolognesi

Tommaso Lamarra

Laura Occhipinti

Paola Vernillo

 

Contact: tbd

Language: How abstraction is encoded and negotiated in words, constructions, and discourse across genres, audiences, and languages.

Cognition and learning: How concepts and representations are formed, knowledge is acquired, and categorization and reasoning abilities develop.

Generalization: How categories are formed at different levels of generality/schematicity or specificity.

Analogy: How relational and analogical reasoning contribute to learning and to the creation of new meaning.

Abstractness: How abstract concepts, as opposed to concrete ones, are represented, processed, and grounded.

Creativity: How abstraction informs the generation and interpretation of novel ideas, concepts, and expressions, in both figurative and literal language.

Artificial intelligence and computational modelling: How artificial systems, including large language models, represent, process, and generate abstract concepts and meanings.

 

References

  • Bolognesi, M. & Vernillo, P. (in press). Abstraction Through Metaphor: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives. In: Laura Speed, Stefan Hartmann (eds.). Handbook of Language and Cognition. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • Borghi, A. M. (2023). The Freedom of Words: Abstractness and the Power of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913294  
  • Mauri, C. (2021). Ad hoc categorization in linguistic interaction. In C. Mauri, I. Fiorentini, & E. Goria (Eds.), Building categories in interaction: Linguistic resources at work (pp. 9–34). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.220.02mau
  • Masini, F., Mauri, C., & Pietrandrea, P. (2018). List constructions: Towards a unified account. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 30(1), 49–94.
  • Mitchell, M. (2021). Abstraction and analogy-making in artificial intelligence. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1505(1), 79–101. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14619
  • Montefinese, M., Gregori, L., Ravelli, A. A., Varvara, R., & Radicioni, D. P. (2023). CONcreTEXT norms: Concreteness ratings for Italian and English words in context. PLOS ONE, 18(10), e0293031. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293031
  • Occhipinti, L., Villani, C., Lamarra, T., Loia, A., Rambelli, G & Bolognesi, M. (2026). What makes texts clear and informative for children? The role of lexical concreteness and specificity. Language and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2026.10107
  • Rambelli, G., Chersoni, E., Collacciani, C., & Bolognesi M. (2024). Can Large Language Models Interpret Noun-Noun Compounds? A Linguistically-Motivated Study on Lexicalized and Novel Compounds. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Pp: 11823–11835. https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.637/
  • Ravelli, A. A., Bolognesi, M. M., & Caselli, T. (2024). Specificity ratings for English data. Cognitive Processing, 26(2), 283–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-024-01239-4
  • Reilly, J., Shain, C., Borghesani, V., Kuhnke, P., Vigliocco, G., Peelle, J. E., Mahon, B. Z., Buxbaum, L. J., Majid, A., Brysbaert, M., Borghi, A. M., De Deyne, S., Dove, G., Papeo, L., Pexman, P. M., Poeppel, D., Lupyan, G., Boggio, P., Hickok, G., Gwilliams, L., Fernandino, L., Mirman, D., Chrysikou, E. G., Sandberg, C. W., Crutch, S. J., Pylkkänen, L., Yee, E., Jackson, R. L., Rodd, J. M., Bedny, M., Connell, L., Kiefer, M., Kemmerer, D., de Zubicaray, G., Jefferies, E., Lynott, D., Siew, C. S. Q., Desai, R. H., McRae, K., Diaz, M. T., Bolognesi, M., Fedorenko, E., Kiran, S., Montefinese, M., Binder, J. R., Yap, M. J., Hartwigsen, G., Cantlon, J., Bi, Y., Hoffman, P., Garcea, F. E., & Vinson, D. (2025). What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 32(1), 243–280. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02556-7
  • Rissman, L., & Lupyan, G. (2024). Words do not just label concepts: activating superordinate categories through labels, lists, and definitions. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 39(5), 657–676. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2024.2350526
  • Rozic, G., & Vigliocco, G. (2026). Learning and processing of abstract words. In International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (pp. 206–212). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.00783-3
  • Veale, T., Shutova, E., & Beigman Klebanov, B. (2022). Metaphor: A computational perspective. Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02160-2
  • Villani, C., & Bolognesi, M. M. (2026). Specificity: Metrics and Norms. In H. Nesi & P. Milin (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Third Edition) (pp. 678–683). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-95504-1.00894-2
  • Vossen, P., Caselli, T., & Cybulska, A. (2018). How concrete do we get telling stories? Topics in Cognitive Science, 10(3), 621–640. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12366
  • Winter, B. (2023). Abstract concepts and emotion: Cross-linguistic evidence and arguments against affective embodiment. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 378(1870). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0368