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Formal Distinctiveness of High‐ and Low‐Imageability Nouns: Analyses and Theoretical Implications
Author(s) -
Reilly Jamie,
Kean Jacob
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1080/03640210709336988
Subject(s) - concreteness , noun , optimal distinctiveness theory , linguistics , phonology , etymology , psychology , word (group theory) , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , cognitive psychology , philosophy , psychotherapist
Words associated with perceptually salient, highly imageable concepts are learned earlier in life, more accurately recalled, and more rapidly named than abstract words (R. W. Brown, 1976; Walker & Hulme, 1999). Theories accounting for this concreteness effect have focused exclusively on semantic properties of word referents. A novel possibility is that word structure may also contribute to the effect. We report a corpus‐based analysis of the phonological and morphological structures of a large set of nouns with imageability ratings (N = 2,023). High‐ and low‐imageability nouns differed by length, etymology, prosody, affixation, phonological neighborhood density, and rates of consonant clustering. On average, nouns denoting abstract concepts were longer, more derivationally complex, and emerged in English from a different distribution of languages than did concrete nouns. We address implications for interactivity of word form and meaning as pertain to theories of word concreteness, lexical acquisition, and word processing.