Specificity effect in concrete/abstract semantic categorization task

Concrete concepts (“banana”) are processed faster and more accurately than abstract ones (“belief”). This phenomenon, supported by empirical studies, is known as the concreteness effect. However, recent research indicates that controlling certain psycholinguistic variables can mitigate or reverse this effect. We introduce a previously neglected variable, namely categorical specificity, and investigate its role in lexical and semantic access, through: ratings, a lexical decision task and a semantic decision task. Our findings confirm the processing advantage of concrete over abstract concepts (concreteness effect) and reveal a similar advantage for specific over generic concepts (specificity effect). We report also a non-significant interaction between the two variables. We discuss the results within the general framework of conceptual abstraction.