WORDS, the building blocks of LANGUAGE, are signs that represent different kinds of CATEGORIES. Some words define categories of concrete entities (such as cat or table) while others define abstract entities (such as belief, empathy). Some words define general categories that include within them different entities (such as the word vehicle, or art) while others define more specific categories (such as tandem, or Impressionism).
Humans construct meaning by transforming experience into mental categories. This process of abstraction is closely linked to language, which provides the labels with which we organize and communicate knowledge. Among the fundamental properties of words that contribute to these processes are concreteness, the degree of connection to sensory experience, and specificity, the level of categorical inclusiveness of a concept. Understanding their role means better understanding how language mediates human abstraction.
However, when studying the mechanisms and effects of abstraction, researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds tend to focus on different aspects of the phenomenon of abstraction. In particular, psychologists and cognitive scientists tend to focus on the variable known as ‘concreteness,’ while linguists and computer scientists tend to focus on the variable known as ‘specificity.’ These different and partial definitions of the phenomenon of abstraction often lead to misunderstandings in interdisciplinary debates and hinder theoretical development.
This is also due to the fact that, while there are extensive collections of judgments provided by native speakers regarding the concreteness of words, no comparable resources based on human evaluations collected on a large scale are yet available for lexical specificity.
To address the lack of resources based on speaker judgments, the ABSTRACTION team collected data on the specificity of thousands of words in Italian and English using both traditional laboratory methods and innovative gamification techniques, creating one of the most comprehensive resources available for the study of lexical specificity.
To address the lack of resources based on speaker judgments, the ABSTRACTION team collected data on the specificity of thousands of words in Italian and English using both traditional laboratory methods and innovative gamification techniques, creating one of the most comprehensive resources available for the study of lexical specificity.
Drawing on these data and other lexical resources, ABSTRACTION investigates the role of specificity and concreteness in human cognition and language. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we study how these two dimensions of meaning contribute to knowledge construction, communication, and creativity.
Thought: to understand how humans organize experience into categories and represent concrete and abstract concepts.
Language: to understand how to construct messages and texts that are clear, informative, and effective for diverse audiences.
Creativity: to explore how the combination of concreteness and specificity fosters the creation of new meanings, particularly through metaphors and other forms of creative language.
ABSTRACTION explores how the specificity and concreteness of words contribute to the construction of meaning based on experience, enabling us to formulate the generalizations that underpin much of human thought and communication. Understanding how people move from concrete experience to the formation of more general categories and concepts is one of the central questions in cognitive science.
This topic is particularly relevant in the debate on the grounding of abstract concepts—that is, on how concepts that do not directly refer to sensory experience acquire meaning in the human mind. At the same time, it plays a fundamental role in research on artificial intelligence, where the question remains open as to how machines and algorithms can construct and use concepts and meanings in a way that is truly comparable to that of human beings.