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SUMMARY:The abstractness effect: Abstract words have a processing advantag
 e over concrete words - Stavroula Kousta\, University College London
DTSTART:20080226T160000Z
DTEND:20080226T173000Z
UID:TALK10355@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Napoleon Katsos
DESCRIPTION:The ability to communicate through language about abstract con
 cepts lies at the heart of what it means to be human. It is\, however\, ge
 nerally thought that this ability is secondary to\, or dependent upon\, th
 e ability to use language to refer to concrete concepts. It is currently t
 aken for granted that concrete words have an unconditional processing adva
 ntage over abstract words. This advantage is assumed to arise because conc
 rete words are more imageable (Paivio\, 1986) or have higher context avail
 ability (Schwanenflugel  \n\nand Shoben\, 1983). In this talk I will prese
 nt three lexical decision experiments and a series of large-scale regressi
 on analyses of lexical decision data from the English Lexicon Project (Bal
 ota\, D.A. et al.\, 2007) which demonstrate that once imageability and con
 text availability (as well as several other lexical and sub-lexical variab
 les) are controlled for\, it is abstract words that have an advantage over
  concrete words. I will further show (using both behavioural and electroph
 ysiological data) how affect is crucially implicated in this advantage. Fi
 nally\, I will discuss the implications of these findings for theories of 
 the way in which abstract and concrete lexical knowledge is represented an
 d processed. 
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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