HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
This article is part of the Research TopicRethinking the Embodiment of Language: Challenges and Future HorizonsView all 10 articles
Beyond Concreteness: Why Word Specificity Is the Missing Piece in Theories on Embodied Language Comprehension
Provisionally accepted
- University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
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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.
Keywords: abstraction, specificity, concreteness, abstractness, semantic categorization, embodiment
Received: 04 Oct 2025; Accepted: 27 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bolognesi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Marianna Marcella Bolognesi, m.bolognesi@unibo.it
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