The Changing role of Sound-Symbolism for small versus large vocabularies

Natural language contains many examples of sound-symbolism, where the form of the word carries information about its meaning. Such systematicity is more prevalent in the words children acquire first, but arbitrariness dominates during later vocabulary development. Furthermore, systematicity appears...

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Main Authors: Brand, James, Monaghan, Padraic, Walker, Peter *
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley Commercial Publisher for Cognitive Science Society 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:http://eprints.sunway.edu.my/698/
http://eprints.sunway.edu.my/698/1/Walker%20Peter%20The%20Changing%20Role%20of%20Sound-Symbolism.pdf
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author Brand, James
Monaghan, Padraic
Walker, Peter *
author_facet Brand, James
Monaghan, Padraic
Walker, Peter *
author_sort Brand, James
building SU Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Natural language contains many examples of sound-symbolism, where the form of the word carries information about its meaning. Such systematicity is more prevalent in the words children acquire first, but arbitrariness dominates during later vocabulary development. Furthermore, systematicity appears to promote learning category distinctions, which may become more important as the vocabulary grows. In this study, we tested the relative costs and benefits of sound symbolism for word learning as vocabulary size varies. Participants learned form meaning mappings for words which were either congruent or incongruent with regard to sound-symbolic relations. For the smaller vocabulary, sound-symbolism facilitated learning individual words, whereas for larger vocabularies sounds-symbolism supported learning category distinctions. 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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spelling sunway-6982019-07-03T09:23:08Z http://eprints.sunway.edu.my/698/ The Changing role of Sound-Symbolism for small versus large vocabularies Brand, James Monaghan, Padraic Walker, Peter * BF Psychology P Philology. Linguistics Natural language contains many examples of sound-symbolism, where the form of the word carries information about its meaning. Such systematicity is more prevalent in the words children acquire first, but arbitrariness dominates during later vocabulary development. Furthermore, systematicity appears to promote learning category distinctions, which may become more important as the vocabulary grows. In this study, we tested the relative costs and benefits of sound symbolism for word learning as vocabulary size varies. Participants learned form meaning mappings for words which were either congruent or incongruent with regard to sound-symbolic relations. For the smaller vocabulary, sound-symbolism facilitated learning individual words, whereas for larger vocabularies sounds-symbolism supported learning category distinctions. 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. Wiley Commercial Publisher for Cognitive Science Society 2017 Article PeerReviewed text en http://eprints.sunway.edu.my/698/1/Walker%20Peter%20The%20Changing%20Role%20of%20Sound-Symbolism.pdf Brand, James and Monaghan, Padraic and Walker, Peter * (2017) The Changing role of Sound-Symbolism for small versus large vocabularies. Cognitve Science. pp. 1-13. ISSN 0364-0213 doi: 10.1111/cogs.12565
spellingShingle BF Psychology
P Philology. Linguistics
Brand, James
Monaghan, Padraic
Walker, Peter *
The Changing role of Sound-Symbolism for small versus large vocabularies
title The Changing role of Sound-Symbolism for small versus large vocabularies
title_full The Changing role of Sound-Symbolism for small versus large vocabularies
title_fullStr The Changing role of Sound-Symbolism for small versus large vocabularies
title_full_unstemmed The Changing role of Sound-Symbolism for small versus large vocabularies
title_short The Changing role of Sound-Symbolism for small versus large vocabularies
title_sort changing role of sound-symbolism for small versus large vocabularies
topic BF Psychology
P Philology. Linguistics
url http://eprints.sunway.edu.my/698/
http://eprints.sunway.edu.my/698/
http://eprints.sunway.edu.my/698/1/Walker%20Peter%20The%20Changing%20Role%20of%20Sound-Symbolism.pdf