Concreteness/Abstractness Concept: State of the Art

Abstract

In recent years, several scientific disciplines – linguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, neurophysiology, medicine, philosophy, education – have paid considerable attention to studying the concreteness/abstractness concept. Existing reviews on this topic cover only one area of research. This article provides an interdisciplinary overview from a general cognitive perspective and gives a general integral idea of this area. It is brief by necessity, but covers the main results obtained. First of all, this is the so-called “concreteness effect”, which consists in faster and more efficient processing of concrete words in comparison with abstract ones. The main theories explaining the effect of concreteness – the dual-coding theory and the context-availability theory – are considered. The problem of representing abstract and concrete words is one of the central problems in cognitive studies of the organization of concepts in our mind. The results of the search for neurophysiological correlates of concreteness/abstractness are discussed. In linguistics, fundamentally new research ideas and results have emerged due to large text corpora and large lexical ontologies. For research in these areas, it is important to have dictionaries with concreteness/abstractness ratings. The article provides data on the most significant dictionaries with human ratings for different languages, and also discusses how to extrapolate human ratings using machine learning methods. These methods, including deep learning of neural networks, can help quickly generate large dictionaries of near human quality, which can facilitate research in the field and extend it to many languages.