The Concreteness Advantage in Lexical Decision Does Not Depend on Perceptual Simulations
Date
2022Author
Bottini, Roberto
Morucci, Piermatteo
D’Urso, Anna
Collignon, Olivier
Crepaldi, Davide
Metadata
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Bottini, R., Morucci, P., D'Urso, A., Collignon, O., & Crepaldi, D. (2022). The concreteness advantage in lexical decision does not depend on perceptual simulations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(3), 731–738. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001090
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Abstract
Abstract words are typically more difficult to identify than concrete words in lexical-decision, word-naming,
and recall tasks. This behavioral advantage, known as the concreteness effect, is often considered as evidence
for embodied semantics, which emphasizes the role of sensorimotor experience in the comprehension of
word meaning. In this view, online sensorimotor simulations triggered by concrete words, but not by abstract
words, facilitate access to word meaning and speed up word identification. To test whether perceptual simulation
is the driving force underlying the concreteness effect, we compared data from early-blind and sighted
individuals performing an auditory lexical-decision task. Subjects were presented with property words referring
to abstract (e.g., “logic”), concrete multimodal (e.g., “spherical”), and concrete unimodal visual concepts
(e.g., “blue”). According to the embodied account, the processing advantage for concrete unimodal visual
words should disappear in the early blind because they cannot rely on visual experience and simulation during
semantics processing (i.e., purely visual words should be abstract for early-blind people). On the contrary,
we found that both sighted and blind individuals are faster when processing multimodal and unimodal visual
words compared with abstract words. This result suggests that the concreteness effect does not depend on
perceptual simulations but might be driven by modality-independent properties of word meaning.