The Impact of Concreteness on Semantic Comprehension

Reassessing the effects of concreteness through comprehension of single words is the main purpose in the current study. Toward this objective، word comprehension tests، and comprehension of nouns from concrete and abstract concept perspectives were examined. 58 right-handed monolingual 6-year old female school students were randomly selected to enroll in two parallel language comprehension tests (picture-word/definition-word matching). Subjects were asked to select an item out of three for 24 (12 concrete and 12 abstract) target nouns. According to the results، participants performed more effectively on the concrete compared to abstract nouns. They obtained more correct responses on picture-word (PW) format of the tasks. The Pearson correlation between concrete PW/Def. W matching (r= 0. 444، p < 0. 01) was statistically significant while the correlation between abstract PW/Def. W matching (r = 0. 134، p < 0. 01) was not statistically significant showing 2. 04 higher mean for PW matching version of the test compared to Def. W matching test. This study has corroborated the effects of concreteness on semantic comprehension consistent with the cognitive growth. Although visual processing yielded a positive effect on comprehension of concrete and abstract nouns while abstract nouns are generally more difficult to grasp.