The results of our HGFC experiments also offer support to the cognitive science findings on the differences in organization of abstract and concrete concepts in the human brain (Crutch and Warrington 2005;Wiemer-Hastings and Xu 2005;Huang, Lee, and Federmeier 2010;Adorni and Proverbio 2012).
our experiments have shown that abstract concepts exhibit both within-domain and cross-domain association patterns (i.e., the literal ones and the metaphorical ones) and that the respective patterns can be successfully learned from linguistic data via the words' distributional properties.