Abstract
The present study investigates Korean mothers’ use of sound symbolism, in particular expressive lengthening and ideophones, in their speech directed to their children. Specifically, we explore whether the frequency and acoustic saliency of sound symbolic words are modulated by the maturity of children’s linguistic ability. A total of 36 infant-mother dyads, 12 each belonging to the three groups of preverbal (M = 8-month-old), early speech (M = 13-month-old), and multiword (M = 27-month-old) stage, were recorded in a 40-min free-play session. The results were consistent with the findings in previous research that the ratio of sound symbolic words in mothers’ speech decreases with child age and that they are acoustically more salient than conventional words in duration and pitch measures. We additionally found that mothers weaken the prominence for ideophones for older children in mean pitch, suggesting that such prominence of these iconic words might bootstrap infants’ word learning especially when they are younger. Interestingly, however, we found that mothers maintain the acoustic saliency of expressive lengthening consistently across children’s ages in all acoustic measures. There is some indication that children at age 2 are not likely to have mastered the fine details of scalar properties in certain words. Thus, it could be that they still benefit from the enhanced prosody of expressive lengthening in learning the semantic attributes of scalar adjectives, and, accordingly, mothers continue to provide redundant acoustic cues longer for expressive lengthening than ideophones.
Highlights
Sound Symbolism and Its Psychological RealityArbitrariness between linguistic form and meaning has long been considered one of the important design features of human language (de Saussure, 1916; Hockett, 1973)
We investigated the use of sound symbolism in speech directed to children by Korean mothers, focusing on the two different categories of ideophones and expressive lengthening
The main finding of our studies is that mothers maintain acoustic saliency for sound symbolic words until later in development, they somewhat weaken the prominence for ideophones when the child reaches a certain age
Summary
Sound Symbolism and Its Psychological RealityArbitrariness between linguistic form and meaning has long been considered one of the important design features of human language (de Saussure, 1916; Hockett, 1973). It has traditionally been assumed that sound symbolism, the non-arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning of a word (e.g., bang), is a marginal phenomenon in language. Many languages have a distinct grammatical category of sound symbolic words referred to as mimetics, ideophones, or expressives. Such inventories exist in many East Asian languages (for Korean see Lee, 1992; for Japanese see Hamano, 1998), most sub-Saharan languages (Childs, 1994), a number of Southeast Asian languages (Diffloth, 1972; Watson, 2001), and some South American languages (Derbyshire and Pullum, 1986), just to name a few. Productivity of sound symbolic words has been shown in naming proper nouns (Kawahara et al, 2018)
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