[SEM] Out of sight but present in mind? Learning and processing concrete and abstract concepts in displaced contexts.

Abstract:
In everyday life, children and adults learn and process concrete and abstract words/concepts in different contexts. For example, a child may learn what asaxophone is by playing it or seeing someone playing it (situated context), or they may learn this concept by listening to their caregivers describing it (displaced context). Likewise, a child or an adult may process the word science while assisting to an experiment (situated context) or while reading a book (displaced context). Displacement affords abstract language and has been defined as one of the design features of language. However, we know very little about how learning and processing may differ in situated vs displaced contexts. In this talk, I will present work that address the following two questions: (1) do speakers modify their multimodal language in situated vs displaced contexts? I will present results from analyses of a naturalistic corpus of dyadic interaction between adult-child (2-4 year old) and adult-adult showing how speakers use multimodal iconicity to imagistically make displaced referents present. (2) Do comprehenders process words in situated and displaced contexts differently? And does this further differ for concrete and abstract concepts? In the second part of the talk, I will present results from an analysis of fMRI data of participants watching movies that shows how abstract referents in situated contexts are processed as if they were concrete and, vice versa, concrete referents in displaced contexts are processed as if they were abstract. Together, this work provides a first glimpse into how displaced language differ from situated language and how this distinction intersects the traditional distinction between concrete and abstract.