Fig 1.
Publications on abstract and concrete concepts or words cover a wide range of disciplines.
sizes of the blocks roughly correspond to proportions of publications in different disciplines.
Fig 2.
Numbers of publications on abstract and concrete concepts or words plotted over six decades.
Fig 3.
Correlation of concreteness ratings by Yao et al. [31] and Yee [32], r = .04, p = .83. (in Yao et al. [31], “1” represented “very abstract”, and “9” represented “very concrete”; in Yee [32], “1” represented “very abstract”, and “5” represented “very concrete”.).
Fig 4.
a. Age distribution of the participants. b. Education level distribution of the participants. c. Geographical distribution of the participants.
Table 1.
Summary of concreteness ratings.
Fig 5.
a. Correlation of the present concreteness ratings and concreteness ratings by Yao et al. [31], r = -.04, p = .34. (in Yao et al. [31], “1” represented “very abstract”, and “9” represented “very concrete”; in the present study, “1” represented “very concrete”, and “5” represented “very abstract”.). b. Correlation of the present concreteness ratings and concreteness ratings by Yee [32], r = -.75, p < .0001. (in Yee [32], “1” represented “very abstract”, and “5” represented “very concrete”; in the present study, “1” represented “very concrete”, and “5” represented “very abstract”.).
Fig 6.
a. Correlation of the present concreteness ratings and imageability ratings by [34], r = -.85, p < .0001. (in [34], “1” represented “not imageable”, and “7” represented “highly imageable”; in the present study, “1” represented “very concrete”, and “5” represented “very abstract”.). b. Correlation of the present concreteness ratings and imageability ratings by Yee [32], r = -.77, p < .0001. (in Yee [32], “1” represented “difficult to form an image”, and “5” represented “easy to form an image”; in the present study, “1” represented “very concrete”, and “5” represented “very abstract”.).
Table 2.
Correlations of concreteness and imageability ratings between studies.
Fig 7.
a. Distributions of concreteness ratings of Yao et al. [31]. b. Distributions of concreteness ratings of [32]. c. Distributions of concreteness ratings of the present study.
Fig 8.
Standard deviation (SD) of concreteness ratings varies between the concrete extreme (1) and the abstract extreme (5) of the continuum.
Fig 9.
Correlation of the present concreteness ratings and word frequency [36], r = -.01, p = .17.
Table 3.
Correlations of concreteness ratings, word frequency, age-of-acquisition (AoA), zRT, and error rate.
Fig 10.
Correlation of the present concreteness ratings and age of acquisition (AoA; Xu et al. [43]), r = .38, p < .0001.
Table 4.
Significant predictors in regression analyses of zRT and error rate on word frequency, AoA, and concreteness.