title: Clustering, hierarchical organization, and the topography of abstract and concrete nouns.
abstract: The empirical study of language has historically relied heavily upon concrete word stimuli. By definition, concrete words evoke salient perceptual associations that fit well within feature-based, sensorimotor models of word meaning. In contrast, many theorists argue that abstract words are "disembodied" in that their meaning is mediated through language. We investigated word meaning as distributed in multidimensional space using hierarchical cluster analysis. Participants (N = 365) rated target words (n = 400 English nouns) across 12 cognitive dimensions (e.g., polarity, ease of teaching, emotional valence). Factor reduction revealed three latent factors, corresponding roughly to perceptual salience, affective association, and magnitude. We plotted the original 400 words for the three latent factors. Abstract and concrete words showed overlap in their topography but also differentiated themselves in semantic space. This topographic approach to word meaning offers a unique perspective to word concreteness.
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Florida Gainesville, FL, USA.
authors.forename: Joshua
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Troche
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurodegenerative Disease, Dementia Research Centre, Institute of Neurology, University College London London, UK.
authors.forename: Sebastian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Crutch
authors.affiliation: Eleanor Saffran Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Temple University Philadelphia, PA, USA ; Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Temple University Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Jamie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Reilly
keywords: abstract concepts; concreteness; embodied cognition; emotion; magnitude; semantic memory