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Abstract concepts are traditionally thought to differ from concrete concepts by their lack of perceptual information, which causes them to be processed more slowly and less accurately than perceptually-based concrete concepts. In two studies, we examined this assumption by comparing concreteness and imageability ratings to a set of perceptual strength norms in five separate modalities: sound, taste, touch, smell and vision. Results showed that concreteness and imageability do not reflect the perceptual basis of concepts: concreteness ratings appear to be based on two different intersecting decision criteria, while imageability ratings are visually biased. Analysis of lexical decision and word naming performance showed that maximum perceptual strength (i.e., strength in the dominant perceptual modality) consistently outperformed both concreteness and imageability ratings in accounting for variance in response latency and accuracy. We conclude that so-called concreteness effects in word processing emerge from the perceptual strength of a concept's representation and discuss the implications for theories of conceptual representation. (Contains 5 tables and 5 figures.)

Recent neuroimaging research has shown that perceptual and conceptual processing share a common, modality-specific neural substrate, while work on modality switching costs suggests that they share some of the same attentional mechanisms. In three experiments, we employed a modality detection task that displayed modality-specific object properties (e.g., unimodal "shrill", "warm", "crimson", or bimodal "jagged", "fluffy") for extremely short display times and asked participants to judge whether each property corresponded to a particular target modality (e.g., auditory, gustatory, tactile, olfactory, visual). Results show that perceptual and conceptual processing share a tactile disadvantage: people are less accurate in detecting expected information regarding the sense of touch than any other modality. These findings support embodied assertions that the conceptual system uses the perceptual system for the purposes of representation. We suggest that the tactile disadvantage emerges for linguistic stimuli due to the evolutionary adaptation of endogenous attention to incoming sensory stimuli. (Contains 4 tables and 3 figures.)

Embodied theories of cognition hold that mentally representing something "red" engages the neural subsystems that respond to environmental perception of that colour. This paper examines whether implicit perceptual information on object colour is represented during sentence comprehension even though doing so does not necessarily facilitate task performance. After reading a sentence that implied a particular colour for a given object, participants were presented with a picture of the object that either matched or mismatched the implied colour. When asked if the pictured object was mentioned in the preceding sentence, people's responses were faster when the colours "mismatched" than when they "matched," suggesting that object colour is represented differently to other object properties such as shape and orientation. A distinction between stable and unstable embodied representations is proposed to allow embodied theories to account for these findings.