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CLS Speaker Series – Chaleece Sandberg (Penn State University) Possible Differences in the Organization of Abstract and Concrete Words in the Semantic System
October 20, 2017
9:00 am
127 Moore

CLS Speaker Series – Chaleece Sandberg (Penn State University) Possible Differences in the Organization of Abstract and Concrete Words in the Semantic System

Possible Differences in the Organization of Abstract and Concrete Words in the Semantic System

It is well known that performance for concrete words is better than for abstract words in both healthy adults and persons with aphasia.  Further, training abstract words in persons with aphasia promotes generalization not seen when training concrete words. While there are several theories that account for the concreteness effect, this one-sided generalization remains difficult to explain. One interesting hypothesis is that of Different Representational Frameworks for abstract and concrete words within the semantic network, such that abstract words are organized via association while concrete words are taxonomically/categorically organized. We tested this hypothesis using a relatedness-judgment task during EEG and fMRI.