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The structuring of abstract and concrete conceptual representations in bilinguals
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Lucas Cruz1, Mirjana Bozic1; 1University of Cambridge
Abstract concepts pose a challenge for theories of embodied cognition: unlike concrete concepts, which are grounded in relatively stable sensorimotor experience, abstract meanings may depend more heavily on linguistic, social, and affective inputs (Borgi et al., 2017; Kousta et al., 2011; Vigliocco et al., 2014). Consistent with this view, prior work suggests that abstract representations exhibit greater variability across individuals and contexts than concrete representations (Davis et al., 2020; Hoffman et al., 2013; Wang & Bi, 2021). However, relatively little work has examined this variability in bilingual speakers, despite bilingualism providing a powerful test case. Because bilingual individuals acquire and use concepts across distinct linguistic and, often, cultural environments, their semantic representations may reveal the extent to which abstract concepts remain language-independent or retain linguistic or affective traces of the environments in which they are acquired. We report preliminary findings from a triplet-based similarity judgement task in which English monolinguals and English–Spanish bilinguals evaluated the similarity structure of abstract and concrete nouns. English stimuli and their Spanish translation equivalents were matched on concreteness, arousal, and valence. To facilitate comparability across semantic spaces, 12 emojis representing a subset of stimuli were included as anchor points for alignment procedures. Bilingual participants were highly proficient in both languages, as assessed by LEXTALE assessment in both languages, and were living in either the UK or Spain at the time of testing. Bilinguals completed the task in both languages one week apart to minimise practice effects and cross-language interference. Ordinal embedding algorithms were used to estimate low-dimensional semantic spaces for each group. We then quantified the extent to which affective dimensions (i.e., valence and arousal) structured these spaces and assessed cross-linguistic alignment of bilingual representations. In monolinguals, valence more strongly organised abstract than concrete semantic spaces (R² = .61 vs .49), with permutation testing indicating a significant difference (p < .05), consistent with proposals that affective information contributes more strongly to abstract semantic representation. In contrast, arousal more strongly structured concrete than abstract representations (R² = .31 vs .07, p < .05). Preliminary analyses from an ongoing subset of bilingual data revealed weaker valence organisation in both English and Spanish embeddings relative to monolingual baselines. Cross-linguistic Procrustes alignment, which quantified geometric similarity between embedding spaces, additionally revealed greater divergence for abstract than concrete representations across languages. Although data collection is still ongoing, these preliminary results suggest that abstract conceptual representations may be more sensitive than concrete representations to language-specific affective and contextual experience and that semantic structure, particularly for abstract concepts, may retain traces of the experiential environments in which concepts are acquired and used.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Multilingualism