390 



MILDRED WEST LORING 



no consistent sequence for the various subjects. It is interest- 

 ing to note though that with both groups of words here sub- 

 divided into three classes each, the conclusion drawn from table 

 1 still holds, that is, that the reaction time is greater for stim- 

 ulus nouns than for stimulus adjectives. 



Table 5. Here are shown the results of separating the stim- 

 ulus nouns into seven logical categories and one unclassified 

 group. 



Considerable difficulty was experienced in rinding a scheme for 

 classification. It was intended at first to classify them into two 

 groups only, abstract and concrete, but when an actual classifica- 

 tion under these simple headings was tried it was found utterly 



TABLE 4 

 Variation of reaction time with accent; three syllable unselected adjectives and nouns 



impossible. There is no hard and fast line between these two 

 classes. There are, of course, nouns which are obviously con- 

 crete, and othere undeniably abstract, from a certain point of 

 view, but between these and including a very large percentage 

 of all nouns are a great horde which are really of widely varying 

 degrees of concreteness and abstractness. The terms are only 

 relative. From one point of view everything is concrete and 

 from another everything is equally abstract. Even the stock 

 illustrations of abstract nouns, such as triangularity or virtue, 

 may be thought of as being just as concrete as furniture or 

 walking. The words that gave the greatest difficulty were those 

 of a lower level of abstractness than those which are usually 

 used as illustrations of abstracts (nouns ending in ity, hood, ness), 



