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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 17, 2026

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition
12:49

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

Published on: July 13, 2019

Concreteness and word production.

J Richard Hanley1, Rebecka P Hunt, Deborah A Steed

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK. rhanley@essex.ac.uk

Memory & Cognition
|October 30, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Abstract words are harder to retrieve than concrete words due to weaker semantic-lexical connections in word production. This study shows retrieval difficulties for abstract words are mainly semantic, not phonological.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Word production involves retrieving words based on semantic and phonological information.
  • The concreteness effect suggests concrete words are processed and retrieved more easily than abstract words.
  • Previous research has explored factors contributing to the concreteness effect in word retrieval.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of word concreteness on word generation within sentence contexts.
  • To differentiate between semantic-lexical and lexical-phonological factors influencing the retrieval of abstract versus concrete words.
  • To examine how different retrieval contexts (definitions vs. event descriptions) affect the concreteness effect.

Main Methods:

  • Experiment 1: Participants retrieved words from dictionary definitions, with omissions and alternates tracked.
  • Experiment 2: Participants generated words for sentences describing specific events.
  • Both experiments measured retrieval success, tip-of-the-tongue states, and analyzed potential semantic and phonological retrieval failures.

Main Results:

  • Abstract words led to more omissions and alternates than concrete words when retrieved from definitions, indicating weaker semantic-lexical weights.
  • Participants reported more tip-of-the-tongue states for abstract words in the definition task, suggesting phonological retrieval issues.
  • In the event description task, the difference in recall between abstract and concrete words diminished, and phonological retrieval failures for abstract words were not observed.

Conclusions:

  • The findings support the view that weaker semantic-lexical weights contribute to the difficulty in producing abstract words.
  • Lexical-phonological weights do not appear to be weaker for abstract words, as phonological retrieval issues were context-dependent.
  • The study highlights the role of semantic processing in the concreteness effect during word production.