Phonological typicality influences on-line sentence comprehension

Abstract

Since Saussure, the relationship between the sound and the meaning of words has been regarded as largely arbitrary. Here, however, we show that a probabilistic relationship exists between the sound of a word and its lexical category. Corpus analyses of nouns and verbs indicate that the phonological properties of the individual words in these two lexical categories form relatively separate and coherent clusters, with some nouns sounding more typical of the noun category than others and likewise for verbs. Additional analyses reveal that the phonological properties of nouns and verbs affect lexical access, and we also demonstrate the influence of such properties during the on-line processing of both simple unambiguous and syntactically ambiguous sentences. Thus, although the sound of a word may not provide cues to its specific meaning, phonological typicality, the degree to which the sound properties of an individual word are typical of other words in its lexical category, affects both word-and sentence-level language processing. The findings are consistent with a perspective on language comprehension in which sensitivity to multiple syntactic constraints in adulthood emerges as a product of language-development processes that are driven by the integration of multiple cues to linguistic structure, including phonological typicality.

The importance of awareness for understanding language.

“…For example, one concern about experiments of this type is the difficulty of fully disentangling a sentence's high level properties (e.g., its meaning) from its low level properties (e.g., its shape and form, c.f., Farmer, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2006). While Sklar and colleagues made efforts to rule out lower level explanations of their results, doing so is difficult because sentences with different meanings necessarily have different forms.…”

How arbitrary is language?

“…This systematicity is likely to be advantageous because it provides information about the general category of the word, rather than at the level of the individual word [43,58]. For mapping from form onto such category levels, systematicity in the spoken word is beneficial [21,59], but for the more specific task of individuating words' meanings, arbitrariness is advantageous, at least for larger vocabularies [13]. For both categorization and individuation, division of labour within the structure of the word may be beneficial [13,27,60].…”

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

“…Systematicity refers to broad statistical relationships among groups of words belonging to the same semantic or syntactic categories. For instance, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) showed that English nouns tend to be more phonologically similar to other nouns than to verbs (and vice versa for verbs). Similarly, Reilly and Kean (2007) demonstrated that there are general differences in the forms of concrete and abstract English nouns.…”