Experience Matters: Electrophysiological Evidence for Interindividual Differences in Representational Frameworks of Concrete and Abstract Words

The differential representational frameworks hypothesis posits that concrete and abstract word processing preferentially rely on similarity-based and associative frameworks, respectively. However, electrophysiological evidence in healthy adults is inconsistent, potentially due to unaccounted interindividual differences in the reliance on these frameworks. We analyzed single-trial N400 amplitudes in 81 healthy participants (power ≥ 80%) during a cued semantic judgment task. Participants performed either similarity (n = 40) or association (n = 41) judgments on concrete and abstract nouns and verbs (e.g., teddy bear, soothe) presented after relevant or irrelevant similarity-based or associative cues. To account for interindividual differences, we calculated a bias quantifying how strongly participants preferred similarity-based vs. associative frameworks from the collected semantic judgments. Mixed-effects analyses revealed no support for differential representational frameworks: concrete words showed consistent N400 reductions for relevant (both similarity-based and associative) compared to irrelevant cues across participants. In contrast, N400 amplitudes for abstract words were only reduced if participants’ bias matched the task version, more strongly over the left hemisphere after associative cues and more strongly over the right hemisphere after similarity-based cues. This suggests differential contributions of left-hemispheric verbal and right-hemispheric multimodal processes. Our results are in line with the controlled semantic cognition framework as well as grounded cognition theory, and point towards interindividual differences, particularly in abstract word processing.