Abstract and concrete words are believed to be processed differently by the brain because of a phenomenon called the concreteness effect in which concrete words are more easily accessed than abstract words. One hypothesis for this effect is that abstract words are organized in an associative network, while concrete words are organized into natural categories of similar items (Crutch & Warrington, 2005). We are currently testing this hypothesis using EEG and fMRI.

A poster of our work can be seen here:

Exton_CNS2018FINAL-ps8ijn