Different people listening to the same story may converge upon a largely shared interpretation while still developing idiosyncratic experiences atop that shared foundation. What linguistic properties support this individualized experience of natural language? Here, we investigate how the "concrete–abstract" axis—the extent to which a word is grounded in sensory experience—relates to within- and across-subject variability in the neural representations of language. Leveraging a dataset of human participants of both sexes who each listened to four auditory stories while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that neural representations of "concreteness" are both reliable across stories and relatively unique to individuals, while neural representations of "abstractness" are variable both within individuals and across the population. Using natural language processing tools, we show that concrete words exhibit similar neural representations despite spanning larger distances within a high-dimensional semantic space, which potentially reflects an underlying representational signature of sensory experience—namely, imageability—shared by concrete words but absent from abstract words. Our findings situate the concrete–abstract axis as a core dimension that supports both shared and individualized representations of natural language.

不同的人听同一个故事可能会聚集在一个基本相同的解释上，同时仍然在这个共同的基础上发展出独特的体验。哪些语言属性支持自然语言的这种个性化体验？在这里，我们研究了 “具体-抽象” 轴——一个词基于感官体验的程度——如何与语言神经表征的主体内部和主体间的可变性相关联。利用在进行功能性磁共振成像时每人听四个听觉故事的男女人类参与者的数据集，我们证明了 “具体 ”的神经表征在故事中既可靠，又对个体来说相对独特，而 “抽象 ”的神经表征在个体内部和人群中都是可变的。使用自然语言处理工具，我们表明，尽管在高维语义空间内跨越了较大的距离，但具体词语表现出相似的神经表征，这可能反映了感官体验的潜在表征特征——即可象性——具体词语共享，但在抽象词语中不存在。我们的研究结果将具体-抽象轴定位为支持自然语言的共享和个性化表示的核心维度。