Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have investigated the differences between concrete concepts and abstract concepts. Nevertheless there’s still no research probing emotional words to that font. The concepts behind emotional words have both affective and cognitive components, hence emotional concepts might have unique pattern of semantic properties. The present study then strives to compare the semantic properties of the three kinds of concepts. Concrete, abstract, and emotional words were selected, and participants had to report the property freely. Collected properties were categorized according to the semantic frame proposed by Wu and Barsalou (2009), and distributions of properties across three kinds of concepts were examined. It was found that the introspective types of word property reveal most dominant for emotional words. In contrast, concrete concepts were reported with more entity properties. Further research can explore different semantic properties within category in order to delineate the semantic continuity and boundaries of human concept structure.