Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do we need inner speech to understand and process abstract concepts? In two preregistered experiments, we tested these questions using dual-task interference in an odd-one-out paradigm where participants were asked to decide either which image did not represent the same concept as two other images (Experiment 1) or which word was not a synonym for the same concept as two other words (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, there were large differences in both reaction time and accuracy between concrete and abstract concepts. When abstract concepts were represented through images, visuospatial interference had a detrimental effect on reaction time, but verbal interference did not. When the same abstract concepts were represented through words (Experiment 2), there were facilitatory effects of both interference types. We discuss possible interpretations of these findings in terms of visual and verbal access to abstract concepts and the hypothesized role of inner speech in processing abstract concepts.