This study investigates vocal congruence across populations with different gender identities. Forty-four participants completed a self-voice perception task in three conditions (Silent Reading, Reading Aloud, and Listening to their recorded voice) after reading gender-stereotyped priming texts. Our findings show that transgender and gender non-conforming participants experience lower vocal congruence listening to their outer voice compared to cisgender participants, and they perceive their inner voice as more congruent to the self. Results confirm the role of interoceptive sensibility on general voice congruence perception, suggesting that it varies across gender identities. Further research is needed to deepen the relationship between inner experience and voice perception and to disentangle the reciprocal relationship between self-identity and self-voice perception.

Contrasting the climate change emergency represents one of the major challenges of modern times. Knowing how people represent ecology-related phenomena is crucial to inform interventions aimed at promoting more effective pro-environmental behaviors. Despite this, literature on the topic is still scarce. To fill this gap, we asked 340 participants to rate 200 concepts—among which Ecological (N = 50, e.g., deforestation)—on numerous semantic dimensions (N = 39), drawing insights from the literature on conceptual organization. A Principal Component Analysis on our dataset revealed the presence of three major components explaining overall the variability of our set of concepts. Interestingly, Ecological concepts had a major role in all of them. Indeed, when compared to other conceptual categories—both related (i.e., Natural—e.g., water—and Geographical/Geopolitical—e.g., ocean, city) and not related (i.e., Technological—e.g., Internet) to the green domain—they figured among the most abstract (Component 1), impacting our political, social, and personal spheres (Component 2), scientific, emotionally charged, and evoking sensorimotor experiences (Component 3) concepts. Overall, our study has a threefold relevance. On a theoretical side, it can contribute to enriching theories on concepts by investigating a new semantic domain that jeopardizes the concrete-abstract dichotomy; on a scientific side, it might broaden categorization research by providing semantic norms for new conceptual domains (the TECo Database); on a societal side, it can enhance politics on these timely themes.

In this Symposium we link different perspectives and traditions of research on language and concepts in the cognitive sciences to better understand the process of abstraction from the social-interactive standpoint. In contrast to the usual benefits of abstraction – such as the ability to categorize and generalize – we underscore the possibility of abstract concepts and words to remain underspecified, “open to the context, the suggestions of others” (Borghi, 2023) or to processes of real-time negotiations (Christiansen & Chater, 2022). This is enabled by their largely non-perceptual rela-tional character (Gentner, 2005) and by the fact that they arise in cognitive systems continually embedded and active in their environments (Cisek 1999; Mannella & Tummolini 2023).