How polysemy affects concreteness ratings: The case of metaphor

Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines, including (experimental) psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, upon collecting concreteness ratings, most studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. As a result, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the validity of concreteness-ratings studies. This is particularly relevant for metaphorical words, which typically describe something abstract in terms of something more concrete (e.g., support: ‘holding weight’ and ‘providing psychological help’). To investigate to which extent perceived concreteness ratings differ when metaphorical versus non-metaphorical word meanings are presented, we obtained concreteness ratings for 96 English nouns from 230 participants. Results show that nouns are perceived as less concrete when a metaphorical (versus non-metaphorical) meaning is triggered. This effect is not affected by a (small) difference in familiarity between the (non-)metaphorical meanings. We thus recommend taking metaphoricity into account in future concreteness-ratings studies to further improve the quality and reliability of such studies, as well as the consistency of the empirical studies that rely on these ratings.