Abstraction in Thought

What is the relationship between concreteness and specificity? How does specificity contribute to the processing of concrete and abstract words? How do abstract concepts vary in specificity?

How word concreteness and specificity contribute to conceptual representation and processing in the human mind.

When we think about a concept, we can consider how closely it relates to sensory experience and how specific or general it is. ABSTRACTION has investigated these two dimensions through speaker judgments, analyses of word meanings, and cognitive experiments. Our findings show that both contribute to how we organize knowledge.

 

1. Concreteness and specificity: distinct but related dimensions

Our research shows that concreteness and specificity describe different aspects of meaning. Concrete words tend to be perceived as more specific, but this relationship is only partial: concepts can be concrete and general, such as vehicle, or abstract and specific, such as Buddhism.

To investigate this relationship, we collected specificity judgments directly from Italian and English speakers, creating resources for research on language and cognition. Comparisons with measures automatically extracted from lexical taxonomies also showed that these measures do not fully align with speakers’ judgments.

These findings highlight the need to distinguish the two dimensions: knowing how concrete a concept is does not tell us how specific it is.

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2. Specificity contributes to how quickly we process words

Language research has often found a processing advantage for concrete words over abstract words in cognitive tasks. ABSTRACTION has shown that specificity also contributes to word processing.

In an experimental study, we measured how quickly participants recognized words and classified their meanings as concrete or abstract. Alongside the advantage for concrete words, we found an advantage for specific words over general words. In the same study, the interaction between concreteness and specificity was not statistically significant.

Specificity therefore needs to be considered when investigating differences between concrete and abstract words: some observed processing differences may also depend on how general or specific the concepts being compared are.

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3. Abstract concepts can also be specific

Abstract concepts do not form a homogeneous set of general meanings. Through a semantic analysis of more than a thousand Italian words, we showed that abstract concepts also vary in specificity, and that this variation relates to the type of meaning they express.

By examining concreteness and specificity together, we identified groups of words with different semantic profiles. Considering both dimensions therefore provides a more precise account of conceptual organization than the concrete–abstract distinction alone. Some semantic domains also contain words spanning many levels of specificity, while others cover a more limited range.

We also investigated how this organization develops during the school years. In a longitudinal study with children aged 9–13, participants constructed “word ladders”, moving from a concept to progressively more general categories. This ability improved over time, particularly among younger participants. However, abstract concepts elicited shorter ladders, showing that the progression from specific to general categories varies depending on conceptual content.

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