The role of sound symbolism in language learning.
@article{Monaghan2012TheRO,
title={The role of sound symbolism in language learning.},
author={Padraic Monaghan and Karen Mattock and Peter Walker},
journal={Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition},
year={2012},
volume={38 5},
pages={
1152-64
}
}Certain correspondences between the sound and meaning of words can be observed in subsets of the vocabulary. These sound-symbolic relationships have been suggested to result in easier language acquisition, but previous studies have explicitly tested effects of sound symbolism on learning category distinctions but not on word learning. In 2 word learning experiments, we varied the extent to which phonological properties related to a rounded-angular shape distinction and we distinguished learning…
84 Citations
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The changing properties of form‐meaning mappings according to vocabulary size may reflect the different ways in which language is learned at different stages of development.
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In two Experiments, it is shown that sound-symbolism provides an advantage for learning of broad categories, which may then transfer to support learning individual words, whereas an arbitrary language impedes acquisition of categories of sound to meaning.
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- Psychology, LinguisticsPloS one
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It is demonstrated that 14-month-old infants could detect Köhler-type (1947) shape-sound symbolism, and could use this sensitivity in their effort to establish a word-referent association.
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The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis is proposed, claiming that pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, and that sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds.
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It is proposed that the vocabulary is structured to enable systematicity in early language learning to promote language acquisition, while also incorporating arbitrariness for later language in order to facilitate communicative expressivity and efficiency.
Sound symbolism: the role of word sound in meaning.
- LinguisticsWiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science
- 2017
Psychological experiments have shown that sound symbolism in one language can be understood by speakers of other languages, suggesting that some kinds of sound symbolism are universal.
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- Linguistics
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Given the importance of the phonological and lexical components of the language in L2 learning, this article discusses an innovative, holistic approach to learning these two components of the…
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- 2016
A learning task designed to distinguish between three existing theories by using a spectrum of sound-symbolically matching, mismatching, and neutral (neither matching nor mismatching) stimuli finds evidence for a sound-Symbolic match boost, but not for a mismatch difficulty compared to the neutral condition.
What drives sound symbolism? Different acoustic cues underlie sound-size and sound-shape mappings
- Physics, PsychologyScientific Reports
- 2017
Investigation of sound symbolism investigated whether different sets of acoustic cues predict size and shape symbolism, respectively, to portray sound symbolism as a process that is not based merely on broad categorical contrasts, such as round/unround and front/back vowels.
Do sound symbolism effects for written words relate to individual phonemes or to phoneme features?
- Linguistics, PsychologyLanguage and Cognition
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abstract The sound of words has been shown to relate to the meaning that the words denote, an effect that extends beyond morphological properties of the word. Studies of these sound-symbolic…
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