Introduction

The abstract-project was a multi-site, EU funded research project that investigated how abstract linguistic concepts are learned and represented by the human mind/brain. It began in May 2006, and terminated in May 2010.

The ability to understand and use language referring to abstract entities, events, and qualities (e.g. contempt, respect, kindness) is arguably a uniquely human faculty. The objective of the abstract-project is to deepen our understanding of the acquisition and representation in the mind/brain of abstract concepts.

This aim is accomplished by adopting: (1) a cross-linguistic perspective, motivated by the existence of culturally bounded abstract concepts, expressed in languages with words that cannot be easily translated; (2) an interdisciplinary perspective, motivated by our aim to explore systematically the developmental, cognitive, computational and neural aspects of abstract knowledge.

As a theoretical framework, we contrast two explicit working hypotheses: the Embodiment Hypothesis (EH) and the Abstraction from Language Hypothesis (ALH). According to the former, abstract knowledge originates in conceptual metaphors: the use of a concrete conceptual domain of knowledge to describe an abstract conceptual domain. The latter proposes that abstract concepts are learned by way of the statistical properties of language, since words that behave similarly within a language (in terms of statistical co-occurrence) are also often conceptually related.