ABSTRACT
The distinction between concrete and abstract nouns has been postulated since several thousand years in ancient Greek and in Chinese language philosophy, (e.g., Kripke, 1972; Jiang, 1993). Furthermore, within the category of concrete nouns the proper names are considered as a distinct subgroup. Such linguistic categories may reflect cognitive structures since they are common in all languages – or they may be completely artificial (Müller & Kutas, 1996). The theoretical assumptions that proper names have a cognitive reality are supported by recent case studies (e.g., Fukatsu et al., 1999) and experimental studies in English and German (Schuth, Werner & Müller, 2002; Weiss & Müller, 2003).
