Abstraction in Language
How does concreteness affect textual clarity? How does specificity affect informativeness? What role do concreteness and specificity play in communication dynamics?
How word concreteness and specificity contribute differently to textual clarity and informativeness.
The words we choose help make a message understandable, informative, and appropriate for its intended audience. ABSTRACTION has investigated these aspects through experiments with school-age readers, analyses of words’ contexts of use, and research on dialogue and public discourse. Our findings show that concreteness and specificity play different roles in communication.
1. Concrete words enhance perceived textual clarity
Text readability is often assessed through word and sentence length. ABSTRACTION has explored the contribution of words’ semantic properties by investigating how readers perceive textual clarity.
In a study with children aged 9–12, we compared short texts that varied in lexical concreteness and specificity. Texts containing more concrete words were perceived as clearer, with this effect observed across the ages examined.
This finding suggests that words’ connection to sensory experience contributes to young readers’ perceived ease of understanding.
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2. Specific words enhance perceived informativeness, particularly among older readers
Clarity and informativeness are distinct qualities. In the same study, specificity primarily contributed to the perceived quantity and relevance of information. This effect was stronger among older participants.
These findings suggest that clarity and informativeness should be considered separately when designing educational materials, while also taking the audience’s age into account.
Another line of research examined how words are distributed across linguistic contexts. Our analyses of Italian and English data show that specificity helps explain variability in words’ contexts of use beyond concreteness. More specific words tend to occur in contexts that are semantically more similar to one another, whereas more general words appear in more diverse contexts.
Specificity therefore relates both to the level of detail conveyed by a word’s meaning and to the range of linguistic contexts in which it is used.
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3. Abstractness contributes to conversational dynamics
The degree of abstractness of a message also contributes to how speakers build a shared understanding. In three preregistered experiments, we asked participants to evaluate linguistic exchanges involving concrete and abstract content.
The findings indicate that abstract content engages processes of monitoring one’s own understanding and social dynamics to a greater extent. They also suggest that reaching a shared understanding in dialogue requires more effort when discussing abstract rather than concrete concepts.
We also developed a method for describing generalizations in language through continuous scales of inclusiveness and abstractness. Applied to an initial dataset of 324 sentences, this method captured nuances that a simple distinction between generic and non-generic expressions tends to overlook.
Finally, we analysed concreteness and specificity in the 2024 US presidential debate. Although Trump and Harris differed in other linguistic choices, their responses did not differ significantly in specificity and showed similar levels of abstractness. This finding highlights the value of empirically testing differences between communication styles by examining multiple properties of language.
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