Sensitivity to emotion information in children's lexical processing

The Flexible Role of Social Experience in the Processing of Abstract Concepts

Multiple representation theories propose that social experience plays an important role in grounding abstract concepts. However, it is less clear how social experience influences the processing of abstract concepts, especially whether this influence is modulated by emotional experience and task demands. To address this question, we orthogonally manipulated the socialness (high vs. low) and emotional valence (positive vs. negative vs. neutral) of abstract words in a lexical decision task (LDT, Experiment 1) and an emotional Stroop task (Experiment 2). Results show that the role of socialness in abstract concept processing was modulated by the concept's emotional valence, with different patterns between the two tasks. Specifically, positive high-socialness (HS) words elicited slower responses than positive low-socialness (LS) words in the emotional Stroop task, but no such difference was observed in the LDT. In both tasks, however, faster responses were found for negative HS than for negative LS words, and no response differences were observed for neutral HS and LS words. These results provide behavioral evidence for the importance of social experience in the processing of abstract concepts and suggest that concept knowledge derived from social experiences interacts with concept knowledge derived from emotional experiences during lexical-semantic processing. This finding clarifies the heterogeneity of abstract concepts, with positive and negative social words constituting distinct subcategories, and confirms experience-based abstract concepts are inherently flexible, selectively combining with other associated embodied experiences based on task demands, thereby dynamically influencing abstract concept processing.

What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary

Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, "concept" has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate semantic theories remain underspecified and/or opaque. Weak construct specificity is among the leading causes of the replication crisis now facing psychology and related fields. Term ambiguity hinders cross-disciplinary communication, falsifiability, and incremental theory-building. Numerous cognitive subdisciplines (e.g., vision, affective neuroscience) have recently addressed these limitations via the development of consensus-based guidelines and definitions. The project to follow represents our effort to produce a multidisciplinary semantic glossary consisting of succinct definitions, background, principled dissenting views, ratings of agreement, and subjective confidence for 17 target constructs (e.g., abstractness, abstraction, concreteness, concept, embodied cognition, event semantics, lexical-semantic, modality, representation, semantic control, semantic feature, simulation, semantic distance, semantic dimension). We discuss potential benefits and pitfalls (e.g., implicit bias, prescriptiveness) of these efforts to specify a common nomenclature that other researchers might index in specifying their own theoretical perspectives (e.g., They said X, but I mean Y).

Learning new words via reading: The influence of emotional narrative context on learning novel adjectives

People learn new words in narrative contexts, but little is known about how the emotional valence of the narrative influences word learning. In a pre-registered experiment, 76 English-speaking adults read 30 novel adjectives embedded in 60 short narratives (20 positive, 20 negative, and 20 neutral valence). Both immediately after and 24 hr later, participants completed a series of post-tests, including speeded recognition, sentence completion, meaning generation, and valence judgement. Results showed that participants learned both the novel word form and its meaning. Compared with novel words experienced in the neutral contexts, those read in the emotional contexts (both positive and negative) showed better learning of orthographic form in the immediate post-test, but only those read in the negative context were recognised with greater accuracy in the delayed post-test. Furthermore, the valence of the context was reflected in the word meanings participants generated for each novel word, suggesting that word valence can be inferred from the valence of the contexts. Results from sentence completion and valence judgement were mixed, depending on the task demands. These findings are discussed with reference to theories of affective embodiment and the implications for learning abstract words are considered.

Mapping semantic space: Exploring the higher-order structure of word meaning

Multiple representation theories posit that concepts are represented via a combination of properties derived from sensorimotor, affective, and linguistic experiences. Recently, it has been proposed that information derived from social experience, or socialness, represents another key aspect of conceptual representation. How these various dimensions interact to form a coherent conceptual space has yet to be fully explored. To address this, we capitalized on openly available word property norms for 6339 words and conducted a large-scale investigation into the relationships between 18 dimensions. An exploratory factor analysis reduced the dimensions to six higher-order factors: sub-lexical, distributional, visuotactile, body action, affective and social interaction. All these factors explained unique variance in performance on lexical and semantic tasks, demonstrating that they make important contributions to the representation of word meaning. An important and novel finding was that the socialness dimension clustered with the auditory modality and with mouth and head actions. We suggest this reflects experiential learning from verbal interpersonal interactions. Moreover, formally modelling the network structure of semantic space revealed pairwise partial correlations between most dimensions and highlighted the centrality of the interoception dimension. Altogether, these findings provide new insights into the architecture of conceptual space, including the importance of inner and social experience, and highlight promising avenues for future research.

The role of emotion in acquisition of verb meaning

Children's earliest acquired words are often learned through sensorimotor experience, but it is less clear how children learn the meaning of concepts whose referents are less associated with sensorimotor experience. The Affective Embodiment Account postulates that children use emotional experience to learn more abstract word meanings. There is mixed evidence for this account; analyses using mega-study datasets suggest that negative or positively valenced abstract words are learned earlier than emotionally neutral abstract words, yet the relationship between sensorimotor experience and valence is inconsistent across different methods of operationalising sensorimotor experience. In the present study, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account specifically in the context of verb acquisition. We tested two semantic dimensions of sensorimotor experience: concreteness and embodiment ratings. Our analyses showed that more positive and negative abstract verbs are acquired at an earlier age than neutral abstract verbs, consistent with the Affective Embodiment Account. When sensorimotor experience is operationalised as embodiment, high embodiment verbs are acquired at an earlier age than low embodiment verbs, and there is further benefit for high embodiment and positively valenced verbs. The findings further clarify the role of Affective Embodiment as a mechanism of language acquisition.

Consensus Paper: Situated and Embodied Language Acquisition

Theories of embodied cognition postulate that perceptual, sensorimotor, and affective properties of concepts support language learning and processing. In this paper, we argue that language acquisition, as well as processing, is situated in addition to being embodied. In particular, first, it is the situated nature of initial language development that affords for the developing system to become embodied. Second, the situated nature of language use changes across development and adulthood. We provide evidence from empirical studies for embodied effects of perception, action, and valence as they apply to both embodied cognition and situated cognition across developmental stages. Although the evidence is limited, we urge researchers to consider differentiating embodied cognition within situated context, in order to better understand how these separate mechanisms interact for learning to occur. This delineation also provides further clarity to the study of classroom-based applications and the role of embodied and situated cognition in the study of developmental disorders. We argue that theories of language acquisition need to address for the complex situated context of real-world learning by completing a "circular notion": observing experimental paradigms in real-world settings and taking these observations to later refine lab-based experiments.

The Development of Abstract Word Meanings

Extensive research has shown that children's early words are learned through sensorimotor experience. Thus, early-acquired words tend to have more concrete meanings. Abstract word meanings tend to be learned later but less is known about their acquisition. We collected meaning-specific concreteness ratings and examined their relationship with age-of-acquisition data from large-scale vocabulary testing with children in grade 2 to college age. Earlier-acquired meanings were rated as more concrete while later-acquired meanings as more abstract, particularly for words typically considered to be concrete. The results suggest that sensorimotor experiences are important to early-acquired word meanings, and other experiences (e.g., linguistic) are important to later-acquired meanings, consistent with a multi-representational view of lexical semantics.

The influence of word concreteness on acquired positive emotion association: An event-related potential study

The ability to acquire positive emotions from words is essential to psychological well-being. How word concreteness affects the process of positive emotion acquisition remains unknown. Here, using an evaluation conditioning paradigm, participants learned the association between pseudowords and concrete/abstract and positive/neutral words. Behavior and event-related potential data were recorded while participants performed emotional recognition tasks. Behavioral results showed that, for neutral words, concrete words were more accurate than abstract words, whereas for positive words, abstract words were more accurate than concrete words. Moreover, N1 and P2 amplitudes in the pseudowords were modulated by interacting word emotion and concreteness. Specifically, pseudowords associated with neutral concrete words elicited larger N1 and P2 amplitudes than pseudowords associated with neutral abstract words. Conversely, N1 and P2 amplitudes in pseudowords associated with positive abstract words were not significant compared to those in positive concrete words. Additionally, an emotional effect was observed when pseudowords were associated with abstract words, showing higher P3 amplitude for the pseudowords associated with positive abstract words than neutral abstract words. No significant effects were found for the pseudowords associated with positive abstract or concrete words. These findings suggest that association learning may influence the early attention processing of emotion acquisition from words, and emotional information of positive abstract words might boost positive emotion acquisition, thereby eliminating the acquisition advantage from positive concrete words.

Abstract concepts and emotion: cross-linguistic evidence and arguments against affective embodiment

How are abstract concepts such as 'freedom' and 'democracy' represented in the mind? One prominent proposal suggests that abstract concepts are grounded in emotion. Supporting this 'affective embodiment' account, abstract concepts are rated to be more strongly positive or more strongly negative than concrete concepts. This paper demonstrates that this finding generalizes across languages by synthesizing rating data from Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish and Spanish. However, a deeper look at the same data suggests that the idea of emotional grounding only characterizes a small subset of abstract concepts. Moreover, when the concreteness/abstractness dimension is not operationalized using concreteness ratings, it is actually found that concrete concepts are rated as more emotional than abstract ones. Altogether, these results suggest limitations to the idea that emotion is an important factor in the grounding of abstract concepts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Editorial concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences

This theme issue aims to view the literature on concepts through a novel lens, that of social interaction and its influence on inner experiences. It discusses unsolved problems in literature on concepts, emphasizing the distinction between concrete versus abstract concepts and external versus internal grounding. This introductory article reflects the two research streams that the theme aims to bridge-in this area, the dimension of embodied interaction with others and how this influences the interaction with ourselves is still underexplored. In the first part, we discuss recent trends in social cognition, showing how interacting with others influences our concepts. In the second part, we address how social interactions become part of our inner world in a Vygotskian fashion. First, we illustrate how interoception, emotion and metacognition are connected with concepts and knowledge. Second, we deal with how language, in both its outer and inner form, can empower cognition and concepts. We also briefly describe how novel experimental and computational methods contribute to investigating the online use of concepts. Overall, this introductory article outlines the potentialities of an integrated and interactive approach that can give new, fresh life to a topic, that of concepts, which lies at the root of human cognition. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Acquiring religious words: dialogical and individual construction of a word's meaning

By the age of eight, there is a significant increase in abstract words in the child's lexicon. A crucial contribution can be seen in the linguistic input, i.e. the way how abstract words are presented by caregivers by means of linguistic perspectivation and emotionalization. Following an interactionist way, we were interested in how the semantics of abstract words is constructed by child and caregiver in duet. We focused on a subset of abstract words and studied the acquisition of meaning of the religious concept mercy. We expected religious words to be emotionally anchored and presented with perspectivation, both contributing to learning. Exploring the dialogic constructions, we investigated eight 7- to 8-year olds and their parents during dialogic reading and studied their strategies focusing on the linguistic means of emotionalization and perspectivation in contextualizing the word. In a subsequent test, we analysed these means used by the children and assessed their individual understanding of mercy. Our analyses indicate that during reading, the enrichment of semantics by emotionalization was related between child and caregiver, whereas cross-situationally, a simultaneous enrichment of emotionalization and perspectivation was present. Moreover, the children demonstrated a conceptual understanding of mercy in religious contexts, but not in secular contexts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Quantifying children's sensorimotor experience: Child body-object interaction ratings for 3359 English words

Body-object interaction (BOI) ratings measure how easily the human body can physically interact with a word's referent. Previous research has found that words higher in BOI tend to be processed more quickly and accurately in tasks such as lexical decision, semantic decision, and syntactic classification, suggesting that sensorimotor information is an important aspect of lexical knowledge. However, limited research has examined the importance of sensorimotor information from a developmental perspective. One barrier to addressing such theoretical questions has been a lack of semantic dimension ratings that take into account child sensorimotor experience. The goal of the current study was to collect Child BOI rating norms. Parents of children aged 5 to 9 years old were asked to rate words according to how easily an average 6-year-old child can interact with each word's referent. The relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with other lexical semantic dimensions were assessed, as well as the relationships of Child and Adult BOI ratings with age of acquisition. Child BOI ratings were more strongly related to valence and sensory experience ratings than Adult BOI ratings and were a better predictor of three different measures of age of acquisition. The results suggest that child-centric ratings such as those reported here provide a more sensitive measure of children's experience that can be used to address theoretical questions in embodied cognition from a developmental perspective.

Bodily, emotional, and public sphere at the time of COVID-19. An investigation on concrete and abstract concepts

The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemics has dramatically affected people’s lives. Among newly established practices, it has likely enriched our conceptual representations with new components. We tested this by asking Italian participants during the first lockdown to rate a set of diverse words on several crucial dimensions. We found concepts are organized along a main axis opposing internal and external grounding, with fine-grained distinctions within the two categories underlining the role of emotions. We also show through a comparison with existing data that Covid-19 impacted the organization of conceptual representations. For instance, subclasses of abstract concepts that are usually distinct converge into a unitary group, characterized by emotions and internal grounding. Additionally, we found institutional and Covid-19 related concepts, for which participants felt more the need for others to understand the meaning, clustered together. Our results show that the spread of Covid-19 has simultaneously changed our lives and shaped our conceptual representations.

A Developmental Framework for Embodiment Research: The Next Step Toward Integrating Concepts and Methods

Embodiment research is at a turning point. There is an increasing amount of data and studies investigating embodiment phenomena and their role in mental processing and functions from across a wide range of disciplines and theoretical schools within the life sciences. However, the integration of behavioral data with data from different biological levels is challenging for the involved research fields such as movement psychology, social and developmental neuroscience, computational psychosomatics, social and behavioral epigenetics, human-centered robotics, and many more. This highlights the need for an interdisciplinary framework of embodiment research. In addition, there is a growing need for a cross-disciplinary consensus on level-specific criteria of embodiment. We propose that a developmental perspective on embodiment is able to provide a framework for overcoming such pressing issues, providing analytical tools to link timescales and levels of embodiment specific to the function under study, uncovering the underlying developmental processes, clarifying level-specific embodiment criteria, and providing a matrix and platform to bridge disciplinary boundaries among the involved research fields.

Emotional Valence Precedes Semantic Maturation of Words: A Longitudinal Computational Study of Early Verbal Emotional Anchoring

We present a longitudinal computational study on the connection between emotional and amodal word representations from a developmental perspective. In this study, children's and adult word representations were generated using the latent semantic analysis (LSA) vector space model and Word Maturity methodology. Some children's word representations were used to set a mapping function between amodal and emotional word representations with a neural network model using ratings from 9-year-old children. The neural network was trained and validated in the child semantic space. Then, the resulting neural network was tested with adult word representations using ratings from an adult data set. Samples of 1210 and 5315 words were used in the child and the adult semantic spaces, respectively. Results suggested that the emotional valence of words can be predicted from amodal vector representations even at the child stage, and accurate emotional propagation was found in the adult word vector representations. In this way, different propagative processes were observed in the adult semantic space. These findings highlight a potential mechanism for early verbal emotional anchoring. Moreover, different multiple linear regression and mixed-effect models revealed moderation effects for the performance of the longitudinal computational model. First, words with early maturation and subsequent semantic definition promoted emotional propagation. Second, an interaction effect between age of acquisition and abstractness was found to explain model performance. The theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

Development of Abstract Word Knowledge

The development of children's word knowledge is an important testing ground for the embodied account of word meaning, which proposes that word meanings are grounded in sensorimotor systems. Acquisition of abstract words, in particular, is a noted challenge for strong accounts of embodiment. We examined acquisition of abstract word meanings, using data on development of vocabulary knowledge from early school to University ages. We tested two specific proposals for how abstract words are learned: the affective embodiment account, that emotional experience is key to learning abstract word meanings, and the learning through language proposal, that abstract words are acquired through language experience. We found support for the affective embodiment account: word valence, interoception, and mouth action all facilitated abstract word acquisition more than concrete word acquisition. We tested the learning through language proposal by investigating whether words that appear in more diverse linguistic contexts are earlier acquired. Results showed that contextual diversity facilitated vocabulary acquisition, but did so for both abstract and concrete words. Our results provide evidence that emotion and sensorimotor systems are important to children's acquisition of abstract words, but there is still considerable variance to be accounted for by other factors. We offer suggestions for future research to examine the acquisition of abstract vocabulary.

Valence and arousal ratings for 11,310 simplified Chinese words

This study reports valence and arousal ratings for 11,310 simplified Chinese words, including 9774 two-character words, 949 three-character words, and 587 four-character words. These affective ratings are validated through comparisons with prior ratings of smaller word samples. All but four words included in this study are from the MEgastudy of Lexical Decision in Simplified CHinese (MELD-SCH) database. As age-of-acquisition ratings and concreteness ratings have recently become available for large portions of words in the MELD-SCH, the affective ratings not only further enrich the database as a valuable research tool, but also allow us to gain insight into a range of psycholinguistic constructs based on normative ratings of a large set of Chinese words. Cross-language comparisons of the valence ratings between Chinese words and English words appear to indicate cultural and sociopolitical influences reflected in affect representations.

Fine Motor Skills and Lexical Processing in Children and Adults

Children’s fine motor skills (FMS) link to cognitive development, however, research on their involvement in language processing, also with adults, is scarce. Lexical items are processed differently depending on the degree of sensorimotor information inherent in the words’ meanings, such as whether these imply a body-object interaction (BOI) or a body-part association (i.e., hand, arm, mouth, foot). Accordingly, three studies examined whether lexical processing was affected by FMS, BOIness, and body-part associations in children (study 1, n = 77) and adults (study 2, n = 80; study 3, n = 71). Analyses showed a differential link between FMS and lexical processing as a function of age. Whereas response latencies indicated that children’s FMS were associated with “hand” words, adults’ FMS linked to the broader concept of BOI. Findings have implications for shared activation theories positing that FMS support lexical processing.

A Multimodal Comparison of Emotion Categorization Abilities in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose Current research has demonstrated that behavioral, emotional, and/or social difficulties often accompany developmental language disorder (DLD). It is an open question to what degrees such difficulties arise as consequence of impaired language and communicative skills, or whether they might also be driven by deficits in verbal and nonverbal emotion processing (e.g., the reduced ability to infer and verbalize emotional states from facial expressions). Regarding the existence of nonverbal deficits, previous research has yielded inconsistent findings. This study was aimed at gaining deeper knowledge of the basic aspects of emotion understanding in children with DLD by comparing their performance on nonverbal and verbal emotion categorization tasks to that of typically developing children. Method Two verbal tasks (Lexical Decision and Valence Decision With Emotion Terms) and two nonverbal tasks (Face Decision and Valence Decision With Facial Expressions) were designed to parallel each other as much as possible, and conducted with twenty-six 6- to 10-year-old children diagnosed with DLD. The same number of typically developed children, carefully matched by age and gender, served as a control group. Results The children with DLD showed lower performance in both verbal tasks and exhibited noticeable problems in the nonverbal emotion processing task. In particular, they achieved lower accuracy scores when they categorized faces by their valence (positive or negative), but did not differ in their ability to distinguish these faces from pictures displaying animals. Conclusions This study provides evidence for the hypothesis that problems in emotion processing in children with DLD might be multimodal. Therefore, the results support the idea of mutual influences in the development of language and emotion skills and contribute to the current debate about the domain specificity of DLD (formerly referred to as specific language impairment).

Is justice grounded? How expertise shapes conceptual representation of institutional concepts

Using abstract concepts is a hallmark of human cognition. While multiple kinds of abstract concepts exist, they so far have been conceived as a unitary kind in opposition to concrete ones. Here, we focus on Institutional concepts, like justice or norm, investigating their fine-grained differences with respect to other kinds of abstract and concrete concepts, and exploring whether their representation varies according to individual proficiency. Specifically, we asked experts and non-experts in the legal field to evaluate four kinds of concepts (i.e., institutional, theoretical, food, artefact) on 16 dimensions: abstractness-concreteness; imageability; contextual availability; familiarity; age of acquisition; modality of acquisition; social valence; social metacognition; arousal; valence; interoception; metacognition; perceptual modality strength; body-object interaction; mouth and hand involvement. Results showed that Institutional concepts rely more than other categories on linguistic/social and inner experiences and are primarily characterized by positive valence. In addition, a more subtle characterization of the institutional domain emerged: Pure-institutional concepts (e.g., parliament) were perceived as more similar to technical tools, while Meta-institutional concepts (e.g., validity) were characterized mainly by abstract components. Importantly, for what concerns individual proficiency, we found that the level of expertise affects conceptual representation. Only law-experts associated Institutional concepts with exteroceptive and emotional experiences, showing also a more grounded and situated representation of the two types of institutional concepts. Overall, our finding highlights the richness and flexibility of abstract concepts and suggests that they differ in the degree of embodiment and grounding. Implications of the results for current theories of conceptual representation and social institutions are discussed.

Spanish affective normative data for 1,406 words rated by children and adolescents (SANDchild)

Most research on the relationship between emotion and language in children relies on the use of words whose affective properties have been assessed by adults. To overcome this limitation, in the current study we introduce SANDchild, the Spanish affective database for children. This dataset reports ratings in the valence and the arousal dimensions for a large corpus of 1406 Spanish words rated by a large sample of 1276 children and adolescents from four different age groups (7, 9, 11 and 13 years old). We observed high inter-rater reliabilities for both valence and arousal in the four age groups. However, some age differences were found. In this sense, ratings for both valence and arousal decreased with age. Furthermore, the youngest children consider more words to be positive than adolescents. We also found sex differences in valence scores since boys gave higher valence ratings than girls, while girls considered more words to be negative than boys. The norms provided in this database will allow us to further extend our knowledge on the acquisition, development and processing of emotional language from childhood to adolescence. The complete database can be downloaded from https://psico.fcep.urv.cat/exp/files/SANDchild.xlsx .

Effects of Emotional Valence and Concreteness on Children's Recognition Memory

There are considerable gaps in our knowledge of how children develop abstract language. In this paper, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account, which proposes that emotional information is more essential for abstract than concrete conceptual development. We tested the recognition memory of 7- and 8-year-old children, as well as a group of adults, for abstract and concrete words which differed categorically in valence (negative, neutral, and positive). Word valence significantly interacted with concreteness in hit rates of both children and adults, such that effects of valence were only found in memory for abstract words. The pattern of valence effects differed for children and adults: children remembered negative words more accurately than neutral and positive words (a negativity effect), whereas adults remembered negative and positive words more accurately than neutral words (a negativity effect and a positivity effect). In addition, signal detection analysis revealed that children were better able to discriminate negative than positive words, regardless of concreteness. The findings suggest that the memory accuracy of 7- and 8-year-old children is influenced by emotional information, particularly for abstract words. The results are in agreement with the Affective Embodiment Account and with multimodal accounts of children's lexical development.

A Future of Words: Language and the Challenge of Abstract Concepts

The paper outlines one of the most important challenges that embodied and grounded theories need to face, i.e., that to explain how abstract concepts (abstractness) are acquired, represented, and used. I illustrate the view according to which abstract concepts are grounded not only in sensorimotor experiences, like concrete concepts, but also and to a greater extent in linguistic, social, and inner experiences. Specifically, I discuss the role played by metacognition, inner speech, social metacognition, and interoception. I also present evidence showing that the weight of linguistic, social, and inner experiences varies depending on the considered sub-kind of abstract concepts (e.g., mental states and spiritual concepts, numbers, emotions, social concepts). I argue that the challenge to explain abstract concepts representation implies the recognition of: a. the role of language, intended as inner and social tool, in shaping our mind; b. the importance of differences across languages; c. the existence of different kinds of abstract concepts; d. the necessity to adopt new paradigms, able to capture the use of abstract concepts in context and interactive situations. This challenge should be addressed with an integrated approach that bridges developmental, anthropological, and neuroscientific studies. This approach extends embodied and grounded views incorporating insights from distributional statistics views of meaning, from pragmatics and semiotics.

Overusing the pacifier during infancy sets a footprint on abstract words processing

Perturbations to the speech articulators induced by frequently using an interfering object during infancy (i.e., pacifier) might shape children's language experience and the building of conceptual representations. Seventy-one typically developing third graders performed a semantic categorization task with abstract, concrete and emotional words. Children who used the pacifier for a more extended period were slower than the others. Moreover, overusing the pacifier increased response time of abstract words, whereas emotional and (above all) concrete words were less affected. Results support the view that abstract words are grounded both in perception-action and in linguistic experience.