Abstract words are hard to acquire; Does social relevance help?

Abstract

Theories of language and conceptual development have proposed that social relevance is helpful for understanding and acquiring the meanings of abstract words. However, there have been few direct tests of these relationships. In the present study, we used a newly quantified measure of word socialness, alongside word concreteness and valence ratings, to determine if children acquire more social abstract words earlier than less social abstract words. Our analysis included 4,047 words and examined the relationships among word socialness, valence, concreteness, and frequency in relation to age of acquisition ratings and, separately, test-based age of acquisition. We found that socialness significantly predicted age of acquisition, facilitating learning of abstract words more than concrete words. However, this greater benefit to abstract words was diminished when accounting for emotional valence. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between socialness and valence, which suggests there may be subsets of highly social and emotional words that are earlier acquired, regardless of concreteness. Our findings highlight the importance of socialness in word learning and underscore the necessity for a more nuanced examination of social concept subtypes to fully understand its facilitatory role in abstract word acquisition.

Keywords: Abstract language development; Cognitive development; Embodied cognition; Language acquisition.