• "Concrete" "Abstract" "Representational plurality"

The main argument of my thesis is concerned with the representational and coding differences between abstract and concrete words and concepts. This difference will be analyzed from the viewpoints of distinct theories. In the literature, the fact that human beings process, understand and retrieve faster the concrete concepts in comparison with the abstract concepts is accepted by all accounts, either modal accounts or amodal accounts or hybrid accounts. However, these different approaches believe in distinct reasons for this difference. The first account is Context availability theory. According to this approach the reason for which the concrete words and concepts are in advantage from the representational point of view is that they have stronger contextual resources. This contextual information is originated from human internal contextual knowledge and external contextual information in our living environment. The second theoretical approach is Dual Coding Theory. DCT on the contrary of CAT does not believe that the availability of contextual information is the main reason of this difference. DCT claims that human beings possess two types of coding system to process the information. Because the information that they receive are divided into two kinds: non-verbal information and verbal information. The non-verbal information is the sensorimotor information that we receive from our living environment. The verbal information is the one that is obtained from the linguistic input stored in the memory. DCT claims that depending on the type of information that humans want to process they use different kind of representational system. Verbal one for verbal information and imaginal one for non verbal information. The next theory that will be explained in the context of representational differences between abstract and concrete words and concepts is Words as Social Tools or WAT model. In agreement with this model abstract words and concepts are not different from concrete ones from the embodiment point of view. This distinction is rooted in other aspects such as importance of linguistic contexts for abstract words, acquisition modality, activation of different neural networks, and meaning variability across languages. The last assumption refers to the fact that the representation of abstract words and concepts depends more on the cultural and linguistic environment. Representational pluralism is the next approach which attempts to explain the difference of coding and representation between concrete and abstract words and concepts. It claims that the concepts are represented neither completely by using sensorimotor information, nor due to the existence of an abstract computational mechanism. Therefore, the concepts that are represented in human cognitive system are grounded on both modal and amodal representations. In accordance witth this position, the explanations of modal theories could be sufficient for the acquisition of the concepts that are simulated and extracted from our human perceptual experiences, but not for the acquisition of the concepts that do not have direct referent in our living environment. On the contrary, the amodal accounts do not totally explain how concrete concepts could be acquired without using their sensorimotor information. Supramodality is the last account which tries to explain this indicated difference between concrete and abstract concepts. In accordance with this approach supramodality does explain the processing of both abstract and concrete concepts, and could be a soloution for all the observed gaps in other described accounts.