Concrete vs abstract words – what do you recall better? A study on dual coding theory

HELP College of Arts and Technology, Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2719v1
Subject Areas
Psychiatry and Psychology, Statistics
Keywords
Dual Coding Theory, Abstract words, Concrete words, Asian Participants
Copyright
© 2017 Yui et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Yui L, Ng R, Perera-W.A. H. 2017. Concrete vs abstract words – what do you recall better? A study on dual coding theory. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2719v1

Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate the theory of dual coding on remembering words, by testing whether concrete words are better recalled than abstract words. A total of 298 (from Asian ethnicity) participants took part in this study. The participants were divided into two groups, where each group was given a list of abstract or concrete words. Then, they were asked to write down as many words as they recall within two minute. The results demonstrated that the participants recalled concrete words better than the abstract words, supporting previous studies.

Author Comment

This paper was presented as a part of a Psychology colloquium. This is a preprint submitted to PeerJ.