Beyond concreteness: why word specificity is the missing piece in theories on embodied language comprehension

The concreteness effect has long been associated with embodied theories of language, which propose that concrete words are easier to process than abstract ones because they more directly engage perceptual and motor simulations. However, empirical findings on this effect remain mixed. This paper argues that such variability stems from overlooking a crucial semantic dimension: word specificity. Drawing on evidence from the ERC-funded ABSTRACTION project, I defend (based on classic and more recent empirical studies) that specificity, defined as a word's position within a conceptual hierarchy and corresponding to the inclusiveness of its category, plays a key role in shaping lexical access and conceptual organization, alone and in interaction with concreteness. The relationship between these two dimensions, and its implications for embodied language processing, has so far remained largely unexplored. Integrating specificity into models of embodied semantic representation offers a more nuanced account of how language supports both abstraction and embodiment in cognition.