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A Quantitative Empirical Analysis of the Abstract/Concrete Distinction
Author(s) -
Hill Felix,
Korhonen Anna,
Bentz Christian
Publication year - 2013
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 - 10.1111/cogs.12076
Subject(s) - concreteness , similarity (geometry) , association (psychology) , feature (linguistics) , computer science , meaning (existential) , cognition , cognitive science , artificial intelligence , cognitive psychology , epistemology , psychology , linguistics , philosophy , neuroscience , image (mathematics)
This study presents original evidence that abstract and concrete concepts are organized and represented differently in the mind, based on analyses of thousands of concepts in publicly available data sets and computational resources. First, we show that abstract and concrete concepts have differing patterns of association with other concepts. Second, we test recent hypotheses that abstract concepts are organized according to association, whereas concrete concepts are organized according to (semantic) similarity. Third, we present evidence suggesting that concrete representations are more strongly feature‐based than abstract concepts. We argue that degree of feature‐based structure may fundamentally determine concreteness, and we discuss implications for cognitive and computational models of meaning.