Note: Abstract Submission Deadline Extended to Dec 10, 2009

Speakers

• Larry Barsalou (Emory University, USA)
• Giovanni Buccino (University of Parma, Italy)
• Stefano Cappa (S. Raffaele University, Italy)
• Manuel Carreiras (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Spain)
• Sebastian Crutch (University College London, UK)
• Ken McRae (University of Western Ontario, Canada)
• Maria Luisa Lo Russo (Scientific Institute E. Medea, Italy)
• Gabriella Vigliocco (University College London, UK)

Discussant

• Tim Shallice (SISSA, Italy & University College London, UK)

Description

The ability to understand and use abstract concepts (e.g., contempt, respect, kindness) is, arguably, a uniquely human faculty. It is generally thought that the ability to use language to refer to abstract concepts is secondary to, or dependent upon, the ability to use language to refer to concrete concepts and dependent upon cognitive development. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that concrete words are processed more efficiently and are remembered better than abstract words. Perhaps because of this implicit assumption that abstract language is dependent upon concrete knowledge, the vast majority of researchers have focused on the learning and use of language to refer to concrete referents, neglecting to some important extent to ask questions about how abstract knowledge is learnt and processed. Up to recently, in fact, we find in the literature only few studies addressing the representation and use of abstract knowledge and, crucially, most of these are limited to asking the question of whether the concreteness advantage reflects a quantitative or qualitative difference between concrete and abstract lexical concepts (dual-code vs. context availability theory).

There are, nonetheless, a few explicit proposals concerning the representation of abstract words. A proposal (that also considers abstract words as dependent upon concrete words) has been developed within Cognitive Linguistics by Lakoff and colleagues. Abstract knowledge is viewed as originating in conceptual metaphors (i.e., the use of a concrete conceptual domain of knowledge to describe an abstract conceptual domain). For example, English consistently uses language concerning "throwing" and "catching" to describe communication of ideas. Gallese, Buccino and colleagues have developed a line of research concerned with exploring this possibility form a neuroscientific point of view. Larry Barsalou and colleagues on the basis of analyses of speaker-generated features suggested that whereas for objects attention focuses on the specific object against a background, for abstract notions attention focuses on social context, events and introspective properties. Within neuropsychology, David Plaut and Tim Shallice have proposed computational models in which concrete words would be more resistant to damage than abstract words because their semantic representation would consist in greater number of features, and Sebastian Crutch and Elizabeth Warrington have been addressing issues concerning differences in organisation of the semantic space for concrete and abstract concepts suggesting that whereas paradigmatic semantic relations are more important for concrete words, syntagmatic relations are more important for abstract words. As part of a EU funded network, Manuel Carreiras, Maria Luisa LoRusso, Stefano Cappa and I are also currently investigating potential differences in content between concrete and abstract words (using primarily behavioural methods and computational modelling) assessing the hypothesis that whereas concrete words are primarily grounded into experience with the world, abstract words are primarily grounded into our experience with language. A related hypothesis is the one that Gleitman and colleagues have proposed for acquisition in which sentence level syntax plays a crucial role (perhaps above and beyond the development of theory of mind) in the acquisition of abstract words such as believe verbs.

These alternative views on the semantic representation of abstract words have the potential to lead to important revisions of our theories of semantics and theories of conceptual development and representation. The workshop provides a forum for these researchers to present their views and for discussing them.

Organizing Committee

• Mark Andrews
• Gabriella Vigliocco
• David Vinson

This workshop is sponsored by the Experimental Psychology Society with further support from the Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Science Research Department, University College London

For enquires, please contact: Antonietta Esposito (a.Esposito@ucl.ac.uk)