Record Detail

Although it has been established that human beings process concrete and abstract
words differently, it is still a matter of debate what factors contribute to this difference. Since
concrete concepts are closely tied to sensory perception, perceptual experience seems to play
an important role in their processing. The present study investigated the processing of nouns
during an auditory lexical decision task. Participants came from three populations differing in
their visual-perceptual experience: congenitally blind persons, word-color synesthetes, and
sighted non-synesthetes. Specifically, three features with potential relevance to concreteness
were manipulated: sensory perception, emotionality, and Husserlian lifeworld, a concept
related to the inner versus the outer world of the self. In addition to a classical concreteness
effect, our results revealed a significant effect of lifeworld: words that are closely linked
to the internal states of humans were processed faster than words referring to the outside
world. When lifeworld was introduced as predictor, there was no effect of emotionality.
Concerning participants’ perceptual experience, an interaction between participant group
and item characteristics was found: the effects of both concreteness and lifeworld were more
pronounced for blind compared to sighted participants. We will discuss the results in the
context of embodied semantics, and we will propose an approach to concreteness based on
the individual’s bodily experience and the relatedness of a given concept to the self.