Are Phonemes Mastered Early More Likely to Be Used in Highly Imaged as Opposed to Abstract Nouns? A Test of Predictions Based on Jakobson's Theory

Abstract

As predicted on the basis of the developmental linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson, the proportional use of categories of phonemes which are mastered by children at an early age, for example, back vowels, bilabial consonants, stop consonants, was weakly and positively correlated with people's ratings of the tendency of nouns to create “clear mental images” for them. The proportional use of categories mastered later, for example, front vowels, lax vowels, sibilants, was weakly and negatively correlated with imagery. Predictions of word emotionality based on the same theory were not confirmed.