Thematic and other semantic relations central to abstract (and concrete) concepts
Autor: | Melissa Troyer, Ken McRae |
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Rok vydání: | 2021 |
Předmět: |
Concept Formation
media_common.quotation_subject Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Context (language use) Lexicon 050105 experimental psychology Sentence processing 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) Developmental and Educational Psychology Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Situational ethics Function (engineering) Language media_common Cognitive science 05 social sciences Abstract and concrete General Medicine Semantics Knowledge Isolation (psychology) Psychology 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Meaning (linguistics) |
Zdroj: | Psychological Research. 86:2399-2416 |
ISSN: | 1430-2772 0340-0727 |
Popis: | In this article, we discuss multiple types of meaningful (semantic) relations underlying abstract (as compared to concrete) concepts. We adopt the viewpoint that words act as cues to meaning (Elman in Ment Lexicon 6(1):1-34, 2011; Lupyan and Lewis in Lang Cogn Neurosci 34(10):1319-1337, 2019), which is dependent on the dynamic contents of a comprehender's mental model of the situation. This view foregrounds the importance of both linguistic and real-world context as individuals make sense of words, flexibly access relevant knowledge, and understand described events and situations. We discuss theories of, and experimental work on, abstract concepts through the lens of the importance of thematic and other semantic relations. We then tie these findings to the sentence processing literature in which such meaningful relations within sentential contexts are often experimentally manipulated. In this literature, some specific classes/types of abstract words have been studied, although not comprehensively, and with limited connection to the literature on knowledge underlying abstract concepts reviewed herein. We conclude by arguing that the ways in which humans understand relatively more abstract concepts, in particular, can be informed by the careful study of words presented not in isolation, but rather in situational and linguistic contexts, and as a function of individual differences in knowledge, goals, and beliefs. |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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