Extensive research has shown that children’s early words are learned through sensorimotor experience. Thus, early-acquired words tend to have more concrete meanings. word meanings tend to be learned later but less is known about their acquisition. We collected meaning-specific concreteness ratings and examined their relationship with age-of-acquisition data from large-scale vocabulary testing with children in grade 2 to college age. Earlier-acquired meanings were rated as more concrete while later-acquired meanings as more abstract, particularly for words typically considered to be concrete. The results suggest that sensorimotor experiences are important to early-acquired word meanings, and other experiences (e.g., linguistic) are important to later-acquired meanings, consistent with a multi-representational view of lexical semantics.

中文翻译：

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抽象词义的发展

广泛的研究表明，儿童的早期单词是通过感觉运动经验学习的。因此，早期获得的单词往往具有更具体的含义。单词含义往往是后来学习的，但对其习得却知之甚少。我们收集了特定意义的具体性评分，并检查了它们与对二年级至大学年龄儿童进行的大规模词汇测试中的习得年龄数据的关系。早期获得的含义被认为更具体，而后来获得的含义则被认为更抽象，特别是对于通常被认为是具体的单词。结果表明，感觉运动经验对于早期获得的词义很重要，而其他经验（例如语言）对于后来获得的意义也很重要，这与词汇语义的多表征观点是一致的。