Measurement of reaction time for processing of concrete and abstract words

Abstract

Concreteness is a phenomenon which refers to the linguistic stimuli to indicate concrete concepts generally show an advantage over abstract concepts. Dual-coding theory is a classical explanation for concreteness effect (Paivio, 1971, 1986). The aim of the study was to measure the reaction time (Judgment task) in processing abstract and concrete words and to find out the gender differences if any. Twenty young adults within the age range of 18-25years (10 males and 10 females) were considered in this study. Stimuli used were abstract and concrete words and total of 100 words were taken from various resources and was given for rating to twenty speech language pathologist and asked them to rate on 3 point rating scale. Out of which 50 words in each category were considered for experiment. Stimuli were audio recorded by a native Kannada adult female speaker and the recorded stimuli were normalized. Separate program was done loaded in DMDX and the stimulus was presented through Headphones and all the participants were asked to judge the type of word. Mixed analysis of variance repeated measures analysis of variance was done for comparison between abstract and concrete words and gender differences. The results of the present study revealed that there were faster reaction times for concrete words compared to abstract words and no gender differences were observed. Conclusion of the study explains that concreteness is an important variable in differentiating the processing abstract and concrete words.