Ricerc@Sapienza

The research project is novel and will represent a major advancement for a variety of reasons.

Sub-kinds of abstract concepts. Current research often considers ACs as belonging to one large, undifferentiated class. This has often lead to inconsistencies in the findings and results. In contrast, in the present project we will first of all create a database of ACs from which we will identify clusters of different ACs. This represents a first important novelty. Compared to previous databases (e.g. Della Rosa et al., 2010), a further novelty is the focus on dimensions as social connotation, valence and interoception, that can be crucial for ACs representation and that have not been previously addressed. We namely hypothesize that with the increase of the abstractness level the focusing on internal dimensions will increase, while the importance of sensory modalities should decrease. Hence, we predict that internal properties will be crucial for specific subkinds of abstract concepts, as mental states and inner states ones.

Developmental approach. Apart some very recent exceptions (e.g., Ponari et al., 2017), the developmental and the cognitive studies on abstract concepts represent two different and independent streams of research. However, a deep comprehension of the role played by linguistic and social experience in ACs requires a perspective that considers variations in abstract conceptualization over the lifespan. Our project, due to the different competences of its members, that range from developmental to cognitive and clinical psychology to cognitive neuroscience, has the ambition to combine these two research lines. In particular, we will focus on the role of linguistic and social input during conceptual acquisition, but we also aim to investigate how and whether the representation of ACs changes with age.

Role of language in the representation of abstract concepts. Many behavioral and neuroscientific studies have demonstrated the importance of the linguistic networks for abstract concepts (brain imaging: see Binder et al., 2005; Wang et al., 2010), while other studies have sought to demonstrate their grounding in sensorimotor systems (Desai et al., 2011). The present project advances previous research adopting an embodied and grounded approach that takes into account the most promising intuitions of distributional approaches, according to which language associations determine word meaning (see for a similar hybrid approach Anderson et al. 2014).

Language and activation of the mouth motor system. Our project will provide a systematic assessment of whether such activation of linguistic information implies an activation of the mouth, identifying the variations of such activation related to different subkinds of abstract concepts, differing in abstractness level. We also aim at identifying the mechanisms subtending such activation. The mouth activation can be namely the product of the re-enactment of the word acquisition experience, for which the social and linguistic input were crucial, or it can be the signal that we use inner talk to re-explain to ourselves the complex meaning of abstract words. In this respect our work can be in keeping with the recent theoretical approaches that have underlined the importance of language as a predictive mechanism and as a way to improve our thought (Dove, 2014; 2016; Bergen & Lupian, 2015; Borghi & Cangelosi, 2014; Lupyan & Clark, 2015), and our WAT proposal can be combined with proposals that underline the importance of introspection for abstract concepts (e.g. Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, 2005).

Abstract concepts and sociality. So far studies on abstract concepts have shown that ACs are grounded in the emotional system (e.g. Moseley et al., 2012; Vigliocco et al., 2014), but to the best of our knowledge no systematic attempt has been made to highlight the importance of the social dimension for their acquisition and mastering (see for an exception Bergelson & Swingley, 2012, on infants). One of the main tenets of the Words As social Tools view is its focus on sociality (Borghi & Binkofski, 2014). Our project will significantly advance the state of the art focusing on how children need social competence to acquire new ACs, on how social exclusion influences ACs, on whether the capability to master and use abstract concepts is influenced by reduced affective and social competences (e.g., alexithymics, people with high Autism-Spectrum Quotient: Paone et al., 2017; Lai et al., 2017; Cecchini et al., 2015) and on how abstract and concrete concepts are differently acquired in the context of joint action (Sacheli et al., 2015; Scorolli et al., 2014; Gianelli et al., 2012).

Methodology. One of the novelty of our project is that we will use a variety of methods - from online questionnaries and analyses on corpora to behavioral experiments, from kinematics to EEG studies -, to address a very specific topic, the representation of ACs.