Assessing abstract thought and its relation to language with a new nonverbal paradigm: Evidence from aphasia

Abstract

In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought nonlinguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required the participant to abstract away from both perceptual features and common setting associations corresponding to the target image. The normed materials were then used with a population of people with aphasia to assess the relationship of abstract thought to language. While the language-impaired group with aphasia showed lower overall accuracy and longer response times than controls in general, of special note is that their response times were significantly longer as a function of a trial's degree of abstractness. Further, the aphasia group's response times in reporting their degree of confidence (a separate, metacognitive measure) were negatively correlated with their language production abilities, with lower language scores predicting longer metacognitive response times. These results provide some support for the hypothesis that language is an important aid to abstract thought and to metacognition about abstract thought.

No evidence for a special role of language in feature-based categorization

“…Our results are somewhat inconsistent with recent work by Langland-Hassan et al (2021), who observe that individuals with aphasia were slower when processing abstract categories compared to concrete categories. The authors argue that the abstract/concrete distinction is similar to the LD/HD distinction because members of abstract categories share fewer common features.…”

“…We reported three experiments that evaluated the hypothesis that linguistic resources are essential for performing feature-based, or low-dimensional (LD), categorization-what we refer to as the 'LD-specific language recruitment hypothesis' (Langland-Hassan et al, 2021;Lupyan, 2009;Lupyan et al, 2012;Lupyan & Mirman, 2013). In Experiment 1, we aimed to replicate the results of Lupyan and Mirman (2013), who showed a selective impairment in LD categorization in individuals with aphasia.…”

“…Couchman et al (2010) contrast familyresemblance categorization, which relies on judgments of overall similarity, considering multiple features in tandem, and criterial-attribute categorization (or 'rule-based categorization'), which requires adhering to a single-dimensional criterial attribute and suppressing all other, irrelevant dimensions (see also Ashby & O'Brien, 2005). Langland-Hassan et al (2021) relate the HD/LD distinction to the concrete/abstract distinction, arguing that items in concrete categories have many shared features, whereas identifying items from an abstract category requires generalizing over many irrelevant properties to identify a small set of commonalities.…”

Concepts for Which We Need Others More: The Case of Abstract Concepts

“…Yet most people would evaluate "beauty" as more abstract than both "dog" and "animal." The members of categories such as "beauty" or "truth" generally do not have many common features (i.e., they have low dimensionality; Langland-Hassan et al, 2021). In this respect, they are more similar to superordinate categories, such as "animal," than to basic and subordinate ones, such as "dog" and "collie," because superordinate categories group exemplars that are more dissimilar than those of basic and subordinate categories.…”

Bodily, emotional, and public sphere at the time of COVID-19. An investigation on concrete and abstract concepts

“…Notably, some of the selected words were more concrete (e.g., body , school ), some more abstract (e.g., destiny , altruism ). The distinction of concepts into concrete and abstract, although highly simplified (Barsalou et al, 2018 ), reflects the fact that some concepts (e.g., stomach ) refer to concrete, single, and clearly bounded referents, activate sensorial modalities to a larger extent, and have many common properties (high-dimensional categories: Langland-Hassan et al, 2021 ; Lupyan & Mirman, 2013 ), while other concepts, i.e., more abstract ones (e.g., future ), are more detached from sensorial experience, collect rather heterogeneous members, and generally refer to complex events and situations (Borghi & Binkofski, 2014 ). We hypothesized that abstract concepts, being more relational and less linked to the correlational structure of the outside environment than concrete ones (Gentner & Asmuth, 2019 ; Malt & Wolff, 2010 ; Thompson et al, 2020 ), are more flexible and more influenced by contextual factors than concrete ones.…”