Sound to meaning correspondences facilitate word learning

Nygaard, Lynne C.; Cook, Allison E.; Namy, Laura L.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.04.001

Cited by 175 publications

(192 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…For words that feature early in language acquisition, systematicity is prominent, but for later-acquired words, the form-meaning mappings reveal increasing arbitrariness. The enhanced systematicity for the early vocabulary supports views that systematicity is useful for language acquisition [15][16][17][18]20]. Systematicity promotes understanding of the communicative function of language early in development, as the form provides information to the learner about the meaning, potentially enabling the child to learn that words have referents.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…For example, in English, words associated with the nose and its functions tend to begin with sn-, or words referring to light often begin with gl- [6]. Preferences for certain sound-meaning relationships, have been demonstrated to affect learning of novel adjectives [15], verbs [16,17], nouns [18,19] and mixes thereof [20], though these studies generally test a forced choice between two alternatives. When the semantic distinction is not immediately available, as in a forced-choice test between two objects from different categories, then learning is less evident but still present under some learning conditions [21].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How arbitrary is language?

Monaghan

Shillcock

Christiansen

et al. 2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

225

278

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It is a long established convention that the relationship between sounds and meanings of words is essentially arbitrary—typically the sound of a word gives no hint of its meaning. However, there are numerous reported instances of systematic sound–meaning mappings in language, and this systematicity has been claimed to be important for early language development. In a large-scale corpus analysis of English, we show that sound–meaning mappings are more systematic than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, this systematicity is more pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and reduces in later vocabulary development. We propose 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.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How arbitrary is language?

Monaghan

Shillcock

Christiansen

et al. 2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

225

278

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, there is evidence that prosodic variations in pitch and amplitude can reliably convey information related to specific semantic domains (e.g. big/small, hot/cold) [29].…”

Section: Language Studies: the Current Focus Approaches And Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution

Vigliocco¹,

Perniss

Vinson³

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

213

131

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Our understanding of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language has traditionally been firmly based on spoken Indo-European languages and on language studied as speech or text. However, in face-to-face communication, language is multimodal: speech signals are invariably accompanied by visual information on the face and in manual gestures, and sign languages deploy multiple channels (hands, face and body) in utterance construction. Moreover, the narrow focus on spoken Indo-European languages has entrenched the assumption that language is comprised wholly by an arbitrary system of symbols and rules. However, iconicity (i.e. resemblance between aspects of communicative form and meaning) is also present: speakers use iconic ges- tures when they speak; many non-Indo-European spoken languages exhibit a substantial amount of iconicity in word forms and, finally, iconicity is the norm, rather than the exception in sign languages. This introduction provides the motivation for taking a multimodal approach to the study of language learning, processing and evolution, and discusses the broad implications of shifting our current dominant approaches and assumptions to encompass multimodal expression in both signed and spoken languages

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“…Werner, 1957;Werner & Wapner, 1952;Marks, 1996) and Linguistics (e.g. Sapir, 1929;Jesperson, 1933;Newman, 1933;Brown, Black & Horowitz, 1955;Nuckolls, 1999;Imai, Kita, Nagumo & Okada, 2008;Nygaard, Cook & Namy, 2009). This paper focuses on experimental approaches to one particular type of sound symbolism: associations between non-words and abstract shapes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect

Cuskley

Simner

Kirby

2015

Psychological Research

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Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba-kiki effectArticle (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Cuskley, Christine, Simner, Julia and Kirby, Simon (2015) Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba-kiki effect. Psychological This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/63979/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Abstract We examine a high-profile phenomenon known as the bouba-kiki effect, in which non-word names are assigned to abstract shapes in systematic ways (e.g. rounded shapes are preferentially labelled bouba over kiki). In a detailed evaluation of the literature, we show that most accounts of the effect point to predominantly or entirely iconic cross-sensory mappings between acoustic or articulatory properties of sound and shape as the mechanism underlying the effect. However, these accounts have tended to confound the acoustic or articulatory properties of nonwords with another fundamental property: their written form. We compare traditional accounts of direct audio or articulatory-visual mapping with an account in which the effect is heavily influenced by matching between the shapes of graphemes and the abstract shape targets. The results of our two studies suggest that the dominant mechanism underlying the effect for literate subjects is matching based on aligning letter curvature and shape roundedness (i.e. non-words with curved letters are matched to round shapes). We show that letter curvature is strong enough to significantly influence word-shape associations even in auditory tasks, where written word forms are never presented to participants. However, we also find an additional phonological influence in that voiced sounds are preferentially linked with rounded shapes, although this arises only in a purely auditory word-shape association task. We conclude that many previous investigations of the bouba-kiki effect may not have given appropriate consideration or weight to the influenc...

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Sound to meaning correspondences facilitate word learning

Cited by 175 publications

References 23 publications

How arbitrary is language?

How arbitrary is language?

Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution

Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect

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