Category production norms for 117 concrete and abstract categories.

We present a database of category production (aka semantic fluency) norms collected in the UK for 117 categories (67 concrete and 50 abstract). Participants verbally named as many category members as possible within 60 seconds, resulting in a large variety of over 2000 generated member concepts. The norms feature common measures of category production (production frequency, mean ordinal rank, first-rank frequency), as well as response times for all first-named category members, and typicality ratings collected from a separate participant sample. We provide two versions of the dataset: a referential version that groups together responses that relate to the same referent (e.g., hippo, hippopotamus) and a full version that retains all original responses to enable future lexical analysis. Correlational analyses with previous norms from the USA and UK demonstrate both consistencies and differences in English-language norms over time and between geographical regions. Further exploration of the norms reveals a number of structural and psycholinguistic differences between abstract and concrete categories. The data and analyses will be of use in the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive modelling, and to any researchers interested in semantic category structure. All data, including original participant recordings, are available at https://osf.io/jgcu6/ .

Reading direct speech quotes increases theta phase-locking: Evidence for cortical tracking of inner speech?

Growing evidence shows that theta-band (4-7 Hz) activity in the auditory cortex phase-locks to rhythms of overt speech. Does theta activity also encode the rhythmic dynamics of inner speech? Previous research established that silent reading of direct speech quotes (e.g., Mary said: "This dress is lovely!") elicits more vivid inner speech than indirect speech quotes (e.g., Mary said that the dress was lovely). As we cannot directly track the phase alignment between theta activity and inner speech over time, we used EEG to measure the brain's phase-locked responses to the onset of speech quote reading. We found that direct (vs. indirect) quote reading was associated with increased theta phase synchrony over trials at 250-500 ms post-reading onset, with sources of the evoked activity estimated in the speech processing network. An eye-tracking control experiment confirmed that increased theta phase synchrony in direct quote reading was not driven by eye movement patterns, and more likely reflects synchronous phase resetting at the onset of inner speech. These findings suggest a functional role of theta phase modulation in reading-induced inner speech.

Cognitive predictors of perceptual adaptation to accented speech.

The present study investigated the effects of inhibition, vocabulary knowledge, and working memory on perceptual adaptation to accented speech. One hundred young, normal-hearing adults listened to sentences spoken in a constructed, unfamiliar accent presented in speech-shaped background noise. Speech Reception Thresholds (SRTs) corresponding to 50% speech recognition accuracy provided a measurement of adaptation to the accented speech. Stroop, vocabulary knowledge, and working memory tests were performed to measure cognitive ability. Participants adapted to the unfamiliar accent as revealed by a decrease in SRTs over time. Better inhibition (lower Stroop scores) predicted greater and faster adaptation to the unfamiliar accent. Vocabulary knowledge predicted better recognition of the unfamiliar accent, while working memory had a smaller, indirect effect on speech recognition mediated by vocabulary score. Results support a top-down model for successful adaptation to, and recognition of, accented speech; they add to recent theories that allocate a prominent role for executive function to effective speech comprehension in adverse listening conditions.

Access to inner language enhances memory for events.

Events are temporally bounded experiences involving people, objects, and actions that can be segmented into sequences of smaller, meaningful events (e.g., steps involved in constructing a piece of furniture), but the role of inner language in remembering such events has been unclear. We investigated whether inner language enhances memory for events in a naturalistic, nonverbal task where participants constructed simple models from memory. Across three experiments, we used linguistic suppression in a dual-task paradigm to test whether inner language improved overall memory performance and completion time, additionally exploring the number of events that could be recalled. We found that access to inner language at encoding consistently affected memory performance: when inner language was disrupted at encoding, participants were poorer at recalling the models and remembered fewer events. This effect was present whether or not the number of events to be recalled exceed event memory capacity (estimated as approximately seven to eight events). Critically, linguistic suppression impaired memory performance to a greater extent than a control secondary task that did not affect access to language; that is, impairment was not solely due to dual-task interference. The results support the proposal that inner language enhances event memory via a mechanism of linguistic bootstrapping, which makes event representation more efficient by allowing more information to be encoded in an event model even when language is not being used in the task. These findings therefore extend theories of event memory and add to a growing body of evidence that inner language is a highly valuable cognitive tool. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Multi-dimensional sensorimotor grounding of concrete and abstract categories.

Semantic categories, and the concepts belonging to them, have commonly been defined by their relative concreteness, that is, their reliance on perception. However, sensorimotor grounding must be regarded as going beyond the basic five senses and incorporate a multi-dimensional variety of perceptual and action experience. We present a series of exploratory analyses examining the sensorimotor grounding of participant-produced member concepts for 117 categories, spanning concrete (e.g. animal and furniture) and highly abstract (e.g. unit of time and science) categories. We found that both concrete and abstract categories are strongly grounded in multi-dimensional sensorimotor experience. Both domains were dominated by vision and, to a lesser extent, head movements, but concrete categories were more grounded in touch and hand-arm action, while abstract categories were more grounded in hearing and interoception. Importantly, this pattern of grounding was not uniform, and subdomains of concrete (e.g. ingestibles, animates, natural categories and artefacts) and abstract (e.g. internal, social and non-social) categories were grounded in different profiles of sensorimotor experience. Overall, these findings suggest that the distinction between abstract and concrete categories is not as clearcut as ontological assumptions might suggest, and that the strength and diversity of sensorimotor grounding in abstract categories must not be underestimated. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

More is not necessarily better: How different aspects of sensorimotor experience affect recognition memory for words.

Semantic richness theory predicts that words with richer, more distinctive semantic representations should facilitate performance in a word recognition memory task. We investigated the contribution of multiple aspects of sensorimotor experience-those relating to the body, communication, food, and objects-to word recognition memory, by analyzing megastudy data in a series of hierarchical linear regressions. We found that different forms of sensorimotor experience produced different effects on memory. While stronger grounding in object- and food-related experience facilitated word memory performance as expected for semantic richness, experience relating to communication did not. Critically, sensorimotor experience relating to the body impaired rather than facilitated recognition memory by inflating false alarms, which was not consistent with the idea that semantically richer representations are more memorable. Additionally, we found that pure imageability (i.e., consciously generating mental imagery, distinct from sensorimotor experience) contributes to semantic richness effects on word memory but with much smaller effect sizes than previously reported, once sensorimotor grounding was taken into account. These results suggest that word recognition memory is often but not consistently facilitated by rich semantic representations and that it is essential to separately consider distinct forms of sensorimotor experience rather than assuming more information is always better. The findings have implications for the use of semantic variables in memory research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Consensus Paper: Current Perspectives on Abstract Concepts and Future Research Directions.

concepts are relevant to a wide range of disciplines, including cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, cognitive, social, and affective neuroscience, and philosophy. This consensus paper synthesizes the work and views of researchers in the field, discussing current perspectives on theoretical and methodological issues, and recommendations for future research. In this paper, we urge researchers to go beyond the traditional abstract-concrete dichotomy and consider the multiple dimensions that characterize concepts (e.g., sensorimotor experience, social interaction, conceptual metaphor), as well as the mediating influence of linguistic and cultural context on conceptual representations. We also promote the use of interactive methods to investigate both the comprehension and production of abstract concepts, while also focusing on individual differences in conceptual representations. Overall, we argue that abstract concepts should be studied in a more nuanced way that takes into account their complexity and diversity, which should permit us a fuller, more holistic understanding of abstract cognition.

Linguistic Distributional Knowledge and Sensorimotor Grounding both Contribute to Semantic Category Production.

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre-registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based on an 11-dimensional representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co-occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow-up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/.

The Relevance of the Availability of Visual Speech Cues During Adaptation to Noise-Vocoded Speech.

Purpose This study first aimed to establish whether viewing specific parts of the speaker's face (eyes or mouth), compared to viewing the whole face, affected adaptation to distorted noise-vocoded sentences. Second, this study also aimed to replicate results on processing of distorted speech from lab-based experiments in an online setup. Method We monitored recognition accuracy online while participants were listening to noise-vocoded sentences. We first established if participants were able to perceive and adapt to audiovisual four-band noise-vocoded sentences when the entire moving face was visible (AV Full). Four further groups were then tested: a group in which participants viewed the moving lower part of the speaker's face (AV Mouth), a group in which participants only see the moving upper part of the face (AV Eyes), a group in which participants could not see the moving lower or upper face (AV Blocked), and a group in which participants saw an image of a still face (AV Still). Results Participants repeated around 40% of the key words correctly and adapted during the experiment, but only when the moving mouth was visible. In contrast, performance was at floor level, and no adaptation took place, in conditions when the moving mouth was occluded. Conclusions The results show the importance of being able to observe relevant visual speech information from the speaker's mouth region, but not the eyes/upper face region, when listening and adapting to distorted sentences online. Second, the results also demonstrated that it is feasible to run speech perception and adaptation studies online, but that not all findings reported for lab studies replicate. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14810523.

Eye Gaze and Perceptual Adaptation to Audiovisual Degraded Speech.

Purpose Visual cues from a speaker's face may benefit perceptual adaptation to degraded speech, but current evidence is limited. We aimed to replicate results from previous studies to establish the extent to which visual speech cues can lead to greater adaptation over time, extending existing results to a real-time adaptation paradigm (i.e., without a separate training period). A second aim was to investigate whether eye gaze patterns toward the speaker's mouth were related to better perception, hypothesizing that listeners who looked more at the speaker's mouth would show greater adaptation. Method A group of listeners (n = 30) was presented with 90 noise-vocoded sentences in audiovisual format, whereas a control group (n = 29) was presented with the audio signal only. Recognition accuracy was measured throughout and eye tracking was used to measure fixations toward the speaker's eyes and mouth in the audiovisual group. Results Previous studies were partially replicated: The audiovisual group had better recognition throughout and adapted slightly more rapidly, but both groups showed an equal amount of improvement overall. Longer fixations on the speaker's mouth in the audiovisual group were related to better overall accuracy. An exploratory analysis further demonstrated that the duration of fixations to the speaker's mouth decreased over time. Conclusions The results suggest that visual cues may not benefit adaptation to degraded speech as much as previously thought. Longer fixations on a speaker's mouth may play a role in successfully decoding visual speech cues; however, this will need to be confirmed in future research to fully understand how patterns of eye gaze are related to audiovisual speech recognition. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/2wqkf/.

Interoception: the forgotten modality in perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts.

Conceptual representations are perceptually grounded, but when investigating which perceptual modalities are involved, researchers have typically restricted their consideration to vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. However, there is another major modality of perceptual information that is distinct from these traditional five senses; that is, interoception, or sensations inside the body. In this paper, we use megastudy data (modality-specific ratings of perceptual strength for over 32 000 words) to explore how interoceptive information contributes to the perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts. We report how interoceptive strength captures a distinct form of perceptual experience across the abstract-concrete spectrum, but is markedly more important to abstract concepts (e.g. hungry, serenity) than to concrete concepts (e.g. capacity, rainy). In particular, interoception dominates emotion concepts, especially negative emotions relating to fear and sadness, moreso than other concepts of equivalent abstractness and valence. Finally, we examine whether interoceptive strength represents valuable information in conceptual content by investigating its role in concreteness effects in word recognition, and find that it enhances semantic facilitation over and above the traditional five sensory modalities. Overall, these findings suggest that interoception has comparable status to other modalities in contributing to the perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

Audiovisual cues benefit recognition of accented speech in noise but not perceptual adaptation.

Perceptual adaptation allows humans to recognize different varieties of accented speech. We investigated whether perceptual adaptation to accented speech is facilitated if listeners can see a speaker's facial and mouth movements. In Study 1, participants listened to sentences in a novel accent and underwent a period of training with audiovisual or audio-only speech cues, presented in quiet or in background noise. A control group also underwent training with visual-only (speech-reading) cues. We observed no significant difference in perceptual adaptation between any of the groups. To address a number of remaining questions, we carried out a second study using a different accent, speaker and experimental design, in which participants listened to sentences in a non-native (Japanese) accent with audiovisual or audio-only cues, without separate training. Participants' eye gaze was recorded to verify that they looked at the speaker's face during audiovisual trials. Recognition accuracy was significantly better for audiovisual than for audio-only stimuli; however, no statistical difference in perceptual adaptation was observed between the two modalities. Furthermore, Bayesian analysis suggested that the data supported the null hypothesis. Our results suggest that although the availability of visual speech cues may be immediately beneficial for recognition of unfamiliar accented speech in noise, it does not improve perceptual adaptation.

Neural bases of accented speech perception.

The recognition of unfamiliar regional and foreign accents represents a challenging task for the speech perception system (Floccia et al., 2006; Adank et al., 2009). Despite the frequency with which we encounter such accents, the neural mechanisms supporting successful perception of accented speech are poorly understood. Nonetheless, candidate neural substrates involved in processing speech in challenging listening conditions, including accented speech, are beginning to be identified. This review will outline neural bases associated with perception of accented speech in the light of current models of speech perception, and compare these data to brain areas associated with processing other speech distortions. We will subsequently evaluate competing models of speech processing with regards to neural processing of accented speech. See Cristia et al. (2012) for an in-depth overview of behavioral aspects of accent processing.