The Effect of Abstract and Concrete Words on Recall on Undergraduate Students - Research Paper Example

Psychology: Research Paper The effect of vs concrete words on recall on undergraduate Affiliation: There have many studies to investigate the level of processing on the ability of a person and the effect of concreteness in recognising a word and the general conclusion of different researchers following different hypothesis such as the automatic imagery hypothesis, the strategic imagery hypothesis and the context availability hypothesis suggested that a person comprehends and recalls an abstract word more poorly as compared to a concrete word. This research was done on the basis of a different hypothesis that there is not much different in recall on abstract word and concrete word. The reason for selecting a different hypothesis was to study the impact of age, sex, education, or any other similar factors on recall of abstract words and concrete words. However, the result of the research was similar to the results of earlier studies, but the gap was not as wide as suggested by earlier researchers. The narrow gap between the recall of abstract words and concrete words suggest that age, sex and educational qualification can influence the research result if it is conducted extensively. This was not an extensive research and involved only 11 participants and only 15 abstract words and 15 concrete words. Hence, in an extensive research the results might draw some better conclusions about the ability of participants to comprehend and recall abstract words and concrete words depending on their age, sex, educational qualification etc. Table of Contents Abstract 2 Introduction 4 Method 7 Participant 7 Material 7 Procedure 7 Result 8 Discussion 8 Summary 10 References 10 The effect of abstract vs concrete words on recall on undergraduate students Introduction The aim of the research is to investigate the level of processing on the ability of a person and the effect of concreteness in recognising a word. It has been shown by many researchers that the "meaning-based features" which the concrete words have, make it easy for recalling the concrete words more accurately as compared to abstract words (Walker & Hulme, 1999, p. 1267). Similarly, the level of processing is also effective on recall significantly as a deep level of processing is responsible for better performance as compared to superficial processing (Weldon & Bellinger, 1997). This research is done for the biological psychology class and it involved 11 students of the class who were given two different sets of words. The first set of words where concrete words while the second set of words were abstract words. The students were asked to look at a screen displaying the set of concrete words for about 30 seconds and try to remember as many as word they could. After that they were stopped and told to write down as many as word they could remember. The same process was repeated for the set of abstract words and they were asked to recall the words, once they finished looking at them in the given time. Paivio (1971, 1986) referred to the historical general findings that concrete words can be remembered more accurately than the abstract words and shown these finding in his study of paired associates learning (Paivio, 1965). However, these general findings have been also confirmed in remembering sentences (Brewer, 1975; Marschark & Paivio, 1977), as well as in recalling unrelated word lists (Christian, Bickley, Tarka, & Clayton, 1978; Rubin, 1980; Rubin & Friendly, 1986). Vellutino & Scanlon (1985) established that both children and adults remember abstract words more poorly. One of the most influential predictors concerned with recall of memory is stimulus concreteness or, more precisely, stimulus imageability (Rubin, 1983). The studies on recall were based on different hypotheses. One of the hypotheses was the automatic imagery hypothesis, which was designed for representing the intuitive view that the concrete words have sensory information which acts as resistant in forgetting these words. According to this view, the two representational systems related to semantic memory concepts are imaginal representation (which consists images) and verbal representation (which consists verbal associates). The intuitive view establishes that concrete words are recalled well as compared to the abstract words as concrete words have imaginal code automatically available (Paivio, 1971). The second hypothesis which was used to study recall is the strategic imagery hypothesis. The strategic imagery hypothesis is considered as a weaker version of the hypothesis discussed above (Rubin, 1983). According to this hypothesis, the imagery is not accessed automatically, but it is invoked strategically when imagery is recognised as being helpful to meet the objectives of a task. The third hypothesis, which has also been very common to study recall on concrete and abstract words is called the context availability hypothesis. The context availability hypothesis emphasised that the available information from prior knowledge explains the concreteness effects. Successfully comprehending and recalling later reflect the abilities of relating the to-be-remembered materials with the prior contextual information a person has in the knowledge base. A person comprehends and recalls an abstract word more poorly as compared to a concrete word as the person experiences more difficulty in getting access to the relevant prior knowledge required for recalling such words. Hence, a person recalls an abstract word more poorly than a concrete word, not due to availability of less imagery, but due to lesser availability of prior contextual knowledge in the memory for such words. In backdrop of the above hypotheses, this research is done with a different hypothesis that practically, there is not much different in recall on abstract word and concrete word. The hypothesis selected for this research is different from the most general and widely accepted hypotheses in order to find whether the findings of the above hypotheses apply uniformly to all or it varies according to age, sex, education, or any other similar factors. The general conclusion of all the hypotheses discussed above is that the abstract words are recalled more poorly as compared to concrete words. The above hypotheses only explain different reasons for poor recall on abstract words. This research with a different and uncommon hypothesis that there is no remarkable difference in recall on abstract words and concrete words, aims to study the impact of age, sex, and educational qualification on recall of abstract words or concrete words. It is expected from this research that young and educated people, specifically students, have abilities different from general people or common people. The young and educated people are more focused and pay more attention to the given tasks as compared to others. Though the hypothesis of this research is different from the general hypotheses, it is expected that the result of this hypothesis might provide a different idea about the recall on abstract words and concrete words. This might open a new field of research on other factors, such as age, sex, educational qualification, profession, etc. of an individual, influencing the recall on abstract or concrete words. The research can further be extended to research the impact of above factors on recall of abstract sentences and concrete sentences or other abstract materials and concrete material. The research can also be done for verbal abstract materials and verbal concrete materials. Hence, the selected hypothesis has been found useful and practical for this research. Method There are three main parts of the method section – participants, material and procedure. The participant section describes the participants and the incentives given to them for participating in the research. The details about the participants and their recall are presented in table 1 below. Participant The total number of participants selected for the research was 11 and they were all senior undergraduate students of the same class of the researcher with the Mean = 16.45, and Standard Deviation = .93. Out of the 11 participants selected for the research 3 were males and 8 were females within the age group of 20-30 years with Mean Age = 25.18 and Standard Deviation = 2.18. An incentive of $10 per hour was compensated to them for their participation in the research. Material The materials required for the research included the following: Pen Paper Two lists of words: a set of 15 concrete words and a set of 15 abstract words A stop watch (Timed for 15 seconds per list of words) A summary sheet to note down the findings A projector with screen to display the words on them Procedure This research involved 11 senior undergraduate students of the biological psychology class who played the role of participants for this research. The participants were given two different sets of 15 abstract words and 15 concrete words and they were asked to look at a screen displaying the set of concrete words and the set of abstract words for about 30 seconds and they were told to remember as many words as they could. After that they were stopped and told to write down as many as word they could remember. The same process was repeated with each participant and the number of recalled words by them was noted down in the summary sheet separately for evaluation as described in the table 1 below. Result The difference in recall between abstract and concrete word lists proved to be statistically significant. (t (10) = 3.53, p = .005) Recall in the concrete condition (M = 7.18, Std. Deviation = 1.47) was superior to the recall in abstract condition (M = 5.73, Std. Deviation = 1.10) By calculating the recall scores in the experiment it was found that 5% of the words recalled by the participants were synonyms of the original words and another 3.9% of the words recalled by the participants were neither synonymous with the listed words nor included in the list. The table 2 presents the Paired Sample Statistics while table 3 displays Paired Sample Correction. Table 4 and table 5 present the Paired Sample Test and table 6 presents the descriptive analysis of the research. Table 7 presents the statistics of the sex of the senior undergraduate students participated in the research. Discussion The recall on abstract words and concrete words has been studied by many scholars such as Paivio (1965, 1971, 1986), Brewer (1975), Marschark & Paivio (1977), Christian, Bickley, Tarka, & Clayton (1978), Rubin (1980), Rubin & Friendly (1986), Vellutino & Scanlon (1985), etc. and their research results are considered as the historical general findings that concrete words can be remembered more accurately than the abstract words. The research projects done by the above scholars were based on three key hypotheses. One of them was the automatic imagery hypothesis, the second hypothesis was the strategic imagery hypothesis while the third and the last was the context availability hypothesis. All these hypotheses concluded that a person comprehends and recalls an abstract word more poorly as compared to a concrete word as the person experiences more difficulty in getting access to the relevant prior knowledge required for recalling such words. Hence, a person recalls an abstract word more poorly than a concrete word, not due to availability of less imagery, but due to lesser availability of prior contextual knowledge in the memory for such words. The strength of this research is that it is done with an entirely different hypothesis from the above mentioned hypotheses. The general hypothesis, which is more widely accepted, is that a person comprehends and recalls an abstract word more poorly as compared to a concrete word. The hypothesis for this research is that, practically, there is not much different in recall on abstract word and concrete word. The hypothesis selected for this research aims to find whether the findings of the above hypotheses apply uniformly to all or it varies according to age, sex, education, or any other similar factors. Another strength of this research is that it aims to study the impact of age, sex, and educational qualification on recall of abstract words or concrete words. It is obvious from the research result that the difference in recall between abstract and concrete word lists were proved to be statistically significant and recall in the concrete condition was superior to the recall in abstract condition, but it was not as strong as suggested by the above mentioned scholars. Therefore, it requires to conduct more extensive research further in order to analyse recall of abstract words and concrete words on young and educated people, specifically students, who have abilities different from general people or common people as the young and educated people are more focused and pay more attention to the given tasks as compared to others. The result of this research opens scope for further research on other factors, such as age, sex, educational qualification, profession, etc. of an individual, influencing the recall on abstract or concrete words. Summary The research aimed for investigating the level of processing on the ability of a person and the effect of concreteness in recognising a word. There are various theories about the above research which are based on three hypotheses the automatic imagery hypothesis, the strategic imagery hypothesis and the context availability hypothesis. All the studies done above have a general conclusion that the concrete words are recalled well as compared to the abstract words. This research was done on the basis of an uncommon hypothesis that there is not much different in recall on abstract word and concrete word. The method used in research had three main parts -participants, material and procedure and the result drawn suggested that the difference in recall between abstract and concrete word lists were proved to be statistically significant and recall in the concrete condition was superior to the recall in abstract condition. The result of the research is similar to the earlier studies, but a different hypothesis selected for the research opens scope to study the impact of age, sex, and educational qualification on recall of abstract words or concrete words. References Brewer, W. F. (1975). Memory for ideas: Synonym substitution. Memory & Cognition, 3, 458-464. Christian, J., Bickuy, W., Tarka, M., and Clayton, K. (1978). Measures of free recall of 900 English nouns: Correlations with imagery, concreteness, meaningfulness, and frequency. Memory & Cognition, 6, 379-390. Marschark, M., " Paivio, A. (1977). Integrative processing of concrete and abstract sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 16,217-231. Paivio, A. (1965). Abstractness, imagery, and meaningfulness in paired associate learning. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 4, 32-38. Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and verbal processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Paivio, A. (1986). Mental representations: A.dual-coding approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rubin, D. C. (1980). 51 properties of 125 words: A unit of analysis of verbal behavior. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 19,736-755. Rubin, D. C. (1983). Associative asymmetry, availability, and retrieval. Memory & Cognition, 11, 83-92. Rubin, D. C. and Friendly, M. (1986). Predicting which words get recalled: Measures of free recall, availability, goodness, emotionality, and pronunciability for 925 nouns. Memory & Cognition, 14, 79-94. Schwanenflugel, P.J., Akin, C. and Luh, W. (1992) Context availability and the recall of abstract and concrete words, Memory &: Cognition, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 20 (1), 96-104. Vellutino, F. R. and Scanlon, D. M. (1985). Free recall of concrete and abstractwords in poor and normal readers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 39, 363-380. Walker, I., & Hulme, C. (1999). Concrete words are easier to recall than abstract words: evidence for a semantic contribution to shortterm serial recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 1256-1271. Weldon, M.S., & Bellinger, K.D. (1997). Collective memory: Collaborative and individual processes in remembering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 1160-1175. Tables Table 1: Recall of Words Recall of Words S. No. Abstract Words Recal Concrete Words Recall Age Years of Education Sex 1 6 7 24 16 F 2 5 8 29 16 F 3 4 6 24 18 F 4 6 6 29 16 F 5 7 10 25 15 F 6 4 6 23 17 M 7 7 7 23 17 F 8 6 5 25 18 M 9 6 9 26 16 F 10 5 7 26 16 F 11 7 8 23 16 M Table 2: Paired Sample Statistics Paired Sample Statistics     Mean N Standard Deviation Standard Error Mean Pair 1 Abstract 5.7273 11 1.10371 0.33278 Concrete 7.1818 11 1.47093 0.44375 Table 3: Paired Sample Correction Paired Sample Correction   N Correction Sig. Pair 1: Abstract & Concrete 11 0.465 0.15 Tables 4: Paired Sample Test Paired Sample Test Paired Differences Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean 95% confidence interval of the difference       Lower Upper Table 5: Paired Sample Test   Paired Sample Test     t df Sig. (2-tailed) Pair 1: Abstract & concrete -3.525 10 0.005 Table 6: Descriptive Analysis   Descriptive Analysis   N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation Age 11 23 29 25.1818 2.18258 Education 11 15 18 16.4545 0.9342 Valid N 11         Table 7: Statistics Sex   Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative Percent   Valid 1 3 27.3 27.3 27.3   2 8 72.7 72.7 100   Total 11 100 100     Read More