Iconic factors and language word order

Abstract

In a series of experiments, college students were presented with a miniature artificial language in which auditorily presented nonsense words were correlated to a visually presented reference field. When the language word order corresponded to the iconic order coding biases of the subjects, the language vocabulary was acquired faster, although these biases could be manipulated through instructions. When the subjects were taught both the word-referent associations and the language rule, and required to make judgments on the correctness of sentences, significant differences still occurred between groups that differed only on the relationship between language word order and organization of the reference field. As this occurred when the reference field was not present, it was suggested that the processing of the language was mediated through a semantic memory system.