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While concrete concepts can be easily processed by experiencing their referents through the body, abstract concepts are acquired and mastered through socio-linguistic interactions (Borghi et al., 2017; 2018; Mazzuca et al., 2021). Since dialogue is the source of abstract meaning acquisition and processing, mechanisms such as negotiation, agreement, intellectual validation and reciprocal contributions might be pivotal to co-build abstract knowledge. In this regard, the notion of social metacognition (Borghi et al., 2018, 2019) points to the importance of relying on the interlocutor in order to obtain an intellectual validation about a complex abstract meaning which cannot be experienced through our own personal experience. The verbal exchanges where reciprocal cooperation is necessary to reach a common agreement on abstract knowledge might have a bodily counterpart. Recently, it has been shown that motor coordination between two partners increases after having verbally interacted about abstract concepts (Fini et al., 2021). Moreover, the sense of closeness among two partners chatting online about abstract concepts increases as a function of how much the other contributed to the conversation (Fini et al. in prep). In the current study, we want to further explore whether the bodily language during a verbal interaction about abstract concepts might consist of specific embodied patterns (i.e., gestures, movements) revealing the need to cooperate to reach a high-level goal: building a meaning. Moreover, to verify whether the culture impacts the dynamics of verbal interaction, we will explore two different samples, a Polish one and an Italian one. Experiment overview In the current study, dyads of participants will be asked to interact on an online video conferencing platform in order to find a common agreement on a definition of concrete and abstract words (e.g., “table”, “phantasy”). We will record their interaction and use pose tracking techniques to track their body movements during the conversation. Based on the extracted body part coordinates we will quantify movement coordination between the participants using recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) techniques (Shockley, 2005). The amount of movement coordination occurring when defining concrete and abstract words will be compared. The study will be performed simultaneously with Italian and Polish participants in order to look for the possible intercultural differences.

Recently, the research on language has manifested the urgency to develop interactive methods to study conceptual categories (abstract, concrete) in ecological scenarios. We believe that studying concepts during online interactions might benefit on the one hand the research on abstract concepts and on the other hand the acquisition of knowledge about the effectiveness of online interactions in fostering interpersonal rapport. Since abstract concepts compared with concrete concepts are mainly acquired through verbal dialogue ( Borghi et al., 2017; 2018; Fini & Borghi, 2019; Fini et al., 2021), investigating them within a well-controlled social context represents the ideal experimental approach to capture how the semantics affect interpersonal relations. Along this perspective, in Zdrazilova et al., 2018, pairs of participants were required to perform the so-called ‘taboo task’, communicating to a partner the meaning of concrete and abstract words without using the words themselves. The authors then analyzed the speech and gestures associated with the different kinds of concepts, highlighting, for example, that when explaining the meaning of abstract concepts participants used more introspective expressions, referred more to people than to objects, and used more metaphorical and beat gestures, and fewer iconic gestures, than when they explained the meaning of concrete concepts. Fini et al. (2021), instead, used an interactive paradigm (Era et al., 2022; Boukarras et al., 2021) to investigate whether being helped when guessing abstract concepts from visual images led to improved motor coordination between the participant and the confederate who helped. Specifically, before and after a joint action task, participants took part in a concept guessing task, where two confederates provided participants with hints to guess the correct abstract or concrete concept associated with the image. The results indicate that participants asked for more hints to guess abstract concepts as compared with concrete concepts and were aware that the other’s contribution was more crucial for abstract compared with concrete concepts. Moreover, in the joint action task, participants were more synchronous in movement with the experimenter who offered them suggestions on abstract words. The same authors recently developed a new interactive paradigm requiring conversations on online platforms (Fini et al., in prep.). The hypothesis of this study was that, if interacting about abstract concepts improves motor coordination between the actors, it might be expected that also other constructs that are sensitive to interpersonal interactions, such as the physical/interpersonal distance, might be modulated after having interacted about an abstract topic. This was tested by asking participants to write some sentences associated to abstract and concrete concepts through an online platform. The experiment included a social condition, in which participants conversed in dyads, and an individual condition, in which they wrote about concrete or abstract concepts by knowing that on the other side of the screen there was a person doing the same and that later they would have read what the other had written. In the individual condition, thus, participants knew that they were writing at the same time of another person, and on the same content, but did not interact with each other. After each conversation/verbal production, the psychological distance and the physical/interpersonal distance between the actors were measured, respectively through the Inclusion of the Other in the Self (iOS) Scale (Aron et al., 1992) and a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), where the distance between two avatars embodying the interlocutors could be regulated (Lisi et al., 2021). Together with these measures, participants were asked to evaluate on a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) the Pleasantness, the Intimacy, the Perceived Difficulty experienced during the verbal production, and the Self contribution, the Other contribution and the Commitment in the experimental social condition. Results revealed that conversing increased the psychological and physical/interpersonal closeness between participants compared to the condition in which participants were not conversing, regardless of the abstract or concrete content of the verbal production. Crucially, the more actors perceive interlocutors' contribution to a conversation about abstract topics, the more psychologically close to the interlocutors they feel. The current study crucially expands the previous one, by exploring whether conversing about different kind of abstract concepts (i.e. philosophical-spiritual (PS), Emotional (EM), Self-sociality (SS), and physical-spatio-temporal-quantitative (PSTQ)) might differently modulate psychological and physical/interpersonal closeness. The experimental paradigm is identical to the one of the study described above, except for the fact that the present study focused only on the social experimental condition. In this regard, a recent study of Villani et al., 2022, has shown that during simulations of conversational exchanges, in which participants responded to sentences involving sub-kinds of concrete (tools, animals, food) and abstract concepts (philosophical-spiritual (PS), Emotional (EM), Self-sociality (SS), and physical-spatio-temporal-quantitative(PSTQ)), the content of the verbal production changed. Specifically, abstract concepts generated higher uncertainty and more interactive exchanges than concrete ones. Along with these results, our aim here was to better explore how concepts of different nature can affect the interpersonal representations, specifically the sense of closeness between the interlocutors, during real verbal exchanges in an on-line platform.

concepts (i.e., “democracy”, “justice”, “peace”) are thought to be mainly acquired through linguistic interactions (Wauters et al., 2003), because they are more detached from a referent to be experienced through the five senses. Their meanings are grounded in social interactions, which represent the essential scaffolding allowing the emergence of “shared-cultural labels” conveying complex knowledge (Fini & Borghi, 2019; Fini et al., 2021). Evidence showing the activation of mouth motor areas during the processing of abstract concepts (Borghi et al., 2011; Granito et al., 2015; Borghi & Zarcone, 2016; Mazzuca et al., 2018) suggests the origin of these is tightly related to social aspects. In keeping with the the WAT proposal (Borghi et al., 2017; Borghi et al., 2017, 2018; Borghi et al., 2019), this activation may indicate that we: i) prepare ourselves to complement our knowledge by asking someone reliable to provide an explanation, or to validate a meaning (social metacognition, Shea et al., 2018; Borghi et al., 2017, 2018; Borghi et al., 2019; Borghi, 2022); ii) re-explain ourselves the meaning associated with the concept; iii) simulate the linguistic experience through which we have learned abstract concepts in the first place. The specific mechanisms -not mutually exclusive- which might undergo the activation of mouth motor areas share a common ground: abstract concepts evoke linguistic experiences. The interactive nature of abstract concepts is manifested not only in the modality through which they are acquired, but also in their use. The process of conflating different experiences in a single symbol characterizes all concepts and words (e.g., Dunbar, 1998; Deacon, 1998). However, the heterogeneity of experiences abstract concepts evoke makes us more uncertain of their meaning and renders the input and interaction with others particularly crucial. During their use, we might need more other people to understand better the meaning of words we are not certain of, or to negotiate and discuss with them this meaning (Borghi, 2022; Mazzuca & Santarelli, 2021). As proposed by Dunbar (1998), the development of abstract representations might evoke the need to be connected with conspecifics. Abstract concepts are not only the “glue” holding together scattered and heterogeneous information (see the notion of situational systematicity in Davies, Altman & Yee, 2020), but they also represent a “social glue” providing a common reference of knowledge within societies (Borghi, 2022; Borghi & Tummolini, 2020; Mazzuca & Santarelli, 2021; Mazzuca et al., 2021). Along these lines, dialogical exchanges might be a preferential grounding source for abstract concepts. Indeed, conversations are the spontaneous human practices of being in relation. So, given their intrinsic social and dialogical nature, we might expect that compared to concrete concepts abstract concepts might more easily “afford” conversations. Here, we intend to operationalise this intuition by investigating the facility to start a conversation, manipulating the abstractness and concreteness of prompting concepts. The Easiness to Start a Conversation with abstract concepts might be driven by different aspects: how much the meaning of a word can be negotiated/discussed (Openness to Negotiation - ON); how much we need others’ contribution to validate the meaning of a word (Social Metacognition - SC, Villani et al., 2019); how much we feel confident in mastering the meaning of the word (Word Confidence - WC), and the ease with which we can think of a context for each word (Context Availability - CA, Schwanenflugel, Harnishfeger & Stowe, 1988). So, investigating new dimensions like Easiness to Start a Conversation, Openness to Negotiation, Social Metacognition, and Word Confidence might be particularly relevant to gather knowledge on how different sub-kinds of concepts are used in linguistic exchanges. In the current study, we will ask participants to rate abstract and concrete words along different dimensions, spanning from more traditional dimensions to more innovative ones. These are: Easiness to Start a Conversation (ESC), Social Metacognition (SC), Openness to Negotiation (ON), Familiarity (FAM), Word Confidence (WC), Contextual availability (CA), Pleasantness and Valence.

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. These studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations in both healthy and clinical populations; however, they have suffered from several issues including generally low sample sizes and a lack of diversity in linguistic implementations. Here, we will test the size and the variability of the semantic priming effect across ten languages by creating a large database of semantic priming values, based on an adaptive sampling procedure. Differences in response latencies between related word-pair conditions and unrelated word-pair conditions (i.e., difference score confidence interval is greater than zero) will allow quantifying evidence for semantic priming, whereas improvements in model fit with the addition of a random intercept for language will provide support for variability in semantic priming across languages., OSF Preprints

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. These studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations in both healthy and clinical populations; however, they have suffered from several issues including generally low sample sizes and a lack of diversity in linguistic implementations. Here, we will test the size and the variability of the semantic priming effect across ten languages by creating a large database of semantic priming values, based on an adaptive sampling procedure. Differences in response latencies between related word-pair conditions and unrelated word-pair conditions (i.e., difference score confidence interval is greater than zero) will allow quantifying evidence for semantic priming, whereas improvements in model fit with the addition of a random intercept for language will provide support for variability in semantic priming across languages.

All the results of the analyses on the Grasping Asynchrony variable of the Human-avatar motor interaction task.