Learning and Processing Abstract Words and Concepts: Insights From Typical and Atypical Development

The paper describes two plausible hypotheses concerning the learning of abstract words and concepts. According to a first hypothesis, children would learn abstract words by extracting co‐occurrences among words in linguistic input, using, for example, mechanisms as described by models of Distributional Semantics . According to a second hypothesis, children would exploit the fact that abstract words tend to have more emotional associations than concrete words to infer that they refer to internal/mental states. Each hypothesis makes specific predictions with regards to when and which abstract words are more likely to be learned; also they make different predictions concerning the impact of developmental disorders. We start by providing a review of work characterizing how abstract words and concepts are learned in development, especially between the ages of 6 and 12. Second, we review some work from our group that tests the two hypotheses above. This work investigates typically developing ( TD ) children and children with atypical development (developmental language disorders [ DLD ] and autism spectrum disorder [ ASD ] with and without language deficits). We conclude that the use of strategies based on emotional information, or on co‐occurrences in language, may play a role at different developmental stages.