Language-mediated abstraction: conceptual concreteness and categorical specificity in language processing

The present work investigates the relationship between conceptual concreteness and categorical specificity in accounting for language-mediated abstraction, advancing the claim that these variables constitute distinct semantic dimensions and examining their role in shaping language processing, conversational dynamics, and communicative strategies across three experimental studies. A key contribution of this work lies in adopting a methodology characterized by progressively increasing ecological validity, moving from traditional psycholinguistic paradigms to more interactive and communicative settings. The first study examines the effects of conceptual concreteness and categorical specificity on word processing, both independently and in interaction, across lexical and semantic decision tasks. In addition to replicating the well-established processing advantage of concrete words over abstract words, the study reports a specificity effect: a behavioral advantage of specific words, which instantiate high-resolution representations, over general words in an abstract/concrete semantic decision task. The second study extends the investigation to the perceived plausibility of simulated conversational excerpts. The study examines the role of concreteness and specificity in conversational dynamics, focusing on two linguistic constructs: uncertainty and curiosity (i.e., the need for clarification). The results show that abstract sentences were more likely to elicit expressions of uncertainty and curiosity. However, expressions signaling the need for clarification were also judged as plausible following concrete-general sentences, suggesting their referential indeterminacy. The third study analyzes semi-naturalistic interactions in which interlocutors describe objects under varying conditions of referential availability (present vs. absent) and shared knowledge (known vs. unknown). The study assesses whether interlocutors systematically modulate the concreteness and specificity of their language under these experimental conditions. The main findings indicate that specificity functions as a linguistic cue for maximizing pragmatic informativeness. Together, these studies support the perspective that categorical specificity plays a central role in understanding how language-mediated abstraction shapes both language processing and communicative behavior.