How Iconicity Helps People Learn New Words: Neural Correlates and Individual Differences in Sound-Symbolic Bootstrapping

Mark Dingemanse,Gwilym Lockwood,Peter Hagoort

doi:10.1525/collabra.42

Mark Dingemanse, Gwilym Lockwood + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.42

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Abstract

Sound symbolism is increasingly understood as involving iconicity, or perceptual analogies and cross-modal correspondences between form and meaning, but the search for its functional and neural correlates is ongoing. Here we study how people learn sound-symbolic words, using behavioural, electrophysiological and individual difference measures. Dutch participants learned Japanese ideophones —lexical sound-symbolic words— with a translation of either the real meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal correspondences) or the opposite meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal clashes). Participants were significantly better at identifying the words they learned in the real condition, correctly remembering the real word pairing 86.7% of the time, but the opposite word pairing only 71.3% of the time. Analysing event-related potentials (ERPs) during the test round showed that ideophones in the real condition elicited a greater P3 component and late positive complex than ideophones in the opposite condition. In a subsequent forced choice task, participants were asked to guess the real translation from two alternatives. They did this with 73.0% accuracy, well above chance level even for words they had encountered in the opposite condition, showing that people are generally sensitive to the sound-symbolic cues in ideophones. Individual difference measures showed that the ERP effect in the test round of the learning task was greater for participants who were more sensitive to sound symbolism in the forced choice task. The main driver of the difference was a lower amplitude of the P3 component in response to ideophones in the opposite condition, suggesting that people who are more sensitive to sound symbolism may have more difficulty to suppress conflicting cross-modal information. The findings provide new evidence that cross-modal correspondences between sound and meaning facilitate word learning, while cross-modal clashes make word learning harder, especially for people who are more sensitive to sound symbolism.

Highlights

Iconicity, or the resemblance-based mapping between aspects of form and meaning, has long been marginalised in linguistic research due to the predominance of arbitrariness, where there is no connection between the form of a word and aspects of its meaning other than social convention [1]
Fact that the P3 and late positive complex are related to all Behaviourally, we found that participants learned the kinds of different functional roles, and the fact that neurosound-symbolically matching word pairs better than the sound- its infancy
In the event-related potentials (ERPs) results, we found no effect of sound symbol- gest that the P3 effect was related to sound symbolism ism in the learning round, which we speculate is because per condition rather than ease of learning and recogniparticipants were focused on the learning task; it is possi- tion per condition

Summary

Introduction

The resemblance-based mapping between aspects of form and meaning, has long been marginalised in linguistic research due to the predominance of arbitrariness, where there is no connection between the form of a word and aspects of its meaning other than social convention [1]. Much of this research is based on two-alternative forced choice paradigms with pseudo words which are deliberately constructed to maximise iconic contrasts. For a more detailed picture of how sound symbolism works in natural language, pseudoword experiments will need to be supplemented with work using real soundsymbolic words. One source of soundsymbolic words is the lexical class of ideophones, which are marked words which depict sensory imagery [5, 6]

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