In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required the participant to abstract away from both perceptual features and common setting associations corresponding to the target image. The normed materials were then used with a population of people with aphasia to assess the relationship of abstract thought to language. While the language-impaired group with aphasia showed lower overall accuracy and longer response times than controls in general, of special note is that their response times were significantly longer as a function of a trial's degree of abstractness. Further, the aphasia group's response times in reporting their degree of confidence (a separate, metacognitive measure) were negatively correlated with their language production abilities, with lower language scores predicting longer metacognitive response times. These results provide some support for the hypothesis that language is an important aid to abstract thought and to metacognition about abstract thought.

近年来，语言已被证明在思想交流中起着重要的认知作用。一种假设得到支持，即语言促进了对抽象类别（例如民主或预测）的思考。为了测试该建议，设计了一套新颖的语义记忆任务试验，旨在对非语言的抽象思想进行评估，以评估其抽象程度。在回答试验时要求参与者从与目标图像相对应的感知特征和通用设置关联中抽象出来，以将这些试验或多或少地评定为抽象。然后将规范化的材料与一群失语症患者一起使用，以评估抽象思维与语言之间的关系。虽然语言障碍的失语症患者的总体准确性较一般对照组低，但响应时间却比对照组长，但值得注意的是，根据试验的抽象程度，他们的响应时间明显更长。此外，失语症组 报告他们的置信度（一种单独的元认知测评）的反应时间与他们的语言产生能力呈负相关，较低的语言分数预示了较长的元认知反应时间。这些结果为以下假设提供了一些支持：语言是抽象思想和对抽象思想的元认知的重要辅助。