Abstract
It is assumed linguistic symbols must be grounded in perceptual information to attain meaning, because the sound of a word in a language has an arbitrary relation with its referent. This paper demonstrates that a strong arbitrariness claim should be reconsidered. In a computational study, we showed that one phonological feature (nasals in the beginning of a word) predicted negative valence in three European languages (English, Dutch, and German) and positive valence in Chinese. In three experiments, we tested whether participants used this feature in estimating the valence of a word. In Experiment 1, Chinese and Dutch participants rated the valence of written valence-neutral words, with Chinese participants rating the nasal-first neutral-valence words more positive and the Dutch participants rating nasal-first neutral-valence words more negative. In Experiment 2, Chinese (and Dutch) participants rated the valence of Dutch (and Chinese) written valence-neutral words without being able to understand the meaning of these words. The patterns replicated the valence patterns from Experiment 1. When the written words from Experiment 2 were transformed into spoken words, results in Experiment 3 again showed that participants estimated the valence of words on the basis of the sound of the word. The computational study and psycholinguistic experiments indicated that language users can bootstrap meaning from the sound of a word.
Highlights
A fundamental question in cognitive science is how language attains meaning
The findings presented in this paper show that phonological features can predict the valence of the word across three Germanic languages and Chinese
In addition to computationally showing that phonological features predict the valence of a word, we tested whether language users rely on these features
Summary
A fundamental question in cognitive science is how language attains meaning. One answer to this question is that meaning must come from outside the language system, because there is no relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002). Because there is no evidence that specific phonological features can predict valence, we first conducted a computational linguistic study to investigate the relationship between phonological features and valence across one logographic language (Chinese) and three alphabetic languages (Dutch, English, and German). We predicted that language users would use those phonological features that predcited valence in the computational study in their valence judgments We tested this hypothesis in three experiments, focusing on Chinese and Dutch. Total counts differed as the matches in the phonological databases differed across the languages We selected those words with the 20% highest valence ratings (6.1 to 8.53) and the 20% with the lowest valence ratings (1.26 to 4), resulting in 5,453 English, 4,324 Chinese, 4,330 Dutch, and 3,736 German words. Experiment 1 investigated whether language users used the phonological feature (nasals in first position) found in the computational study in their processing of the valence of words. We predicted that Chinese speakers were more likely to consider written words starting with nasals as more positive, whereas Dutch speakers were more likely to consider written words starting with nasals as more negative in valence
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