Abstract
While linguistic theory posits an arbitrary relation between signifiers and the signified (de Saussure, 1916), our analysis of a large-scale German database containing affective ratings of words revealed that certain phoneme clusters occur more often in words denoting concepts with negative and arousing meaning. Here, we investigate how such phoneme clusters that potentially serve as sublexical markers of affect can influence language processing. We registered the EEG signal during a lexical decision task with a novel manipulation of the words' putative sublexical affective potential: the means of valence and arousal values for single phoneme clusters, each computed as a function of respective values of words from the database these phoneme clusters occur in. Our experimental manipulations also investigate potential contributions of formal salience to the sublexical affective potential: Typically, negative high-arousing phonological segments—based on our calculations—tend to be less frequent and more structurally complex than neutral ones. We thus constructed two experimental sets, one involving this natural confound, while controlling for it in the other. A negative high-arousing sublexical affective potential in the strictly controlled stimulus set yielded an early posterior negativity (EPN), in similar ways as an independent manipulation of lexical affective content did. When other potentially salient formal features at the sublexical level were not controlled for, the effect of the sublexical affective potential was strengthened and prolonged (250–650 ms), presumably because formal salience helps making specific phoneme clusters efficient sublexical markers of negative high-arousing affective meaning. These neurophysiological data support the assumption that the organization of a language's vocabulary involves systematic sound-to-meaning correspondences at the phonemic level that influence the way we process language.
Highlights
IntroductionMost people would probably agree that not all words sound “neutral.” But is it just personal taste or idiosyncratic individual experience that some words sound nicer and others rather harsh to us? Or do, on the contrary, sublexical phonological patterns possess systematic affective connotations? And if so, might these relate systematically to the meaning of words? A potential associative or even physical resemblance between sound and meaning of a word is called phonological iconicity in terms of Peirce’s typology of semiotic elements (Peirce, 1931; see Perniss et al, 2010; Aryani et al, 2013; Schmidtke et al, 2014a), challenging the conventional linguistic view that the relationship between the signifier and the signified be arbitrary (de Saussure, 1916)
Manipulated Stimulus Set The analysis of reaction times (RTs) for the sublexical affective potential yielded no significant differences between the RTs to sublexically negative high-arousing words and to sublexically neutral low-arousing words [F1(1, 40) = 3.66, p = 0.06, ηp2 = 0.08; F2(1, 306) = 1.45, p = 0.23, ηp2 = 0.01]
The present study investigates whether systematic sound-tomeaning correspondences that we had detected in the German language influence the neural processes of language perception— assessed by EEG recordings during the most standard task used in psycholinguistic research: visual lexical decision
Summary
Most people would probably agree that not all words sound “neutral.” But is it just personal taste or idiosyncratic individual experience that some words sound nicer and others rather harsh to us? Or do, on the contrary, sublexical phonological patterns possess systematic affective connotations? And if so, might these relate systematically to the meaning of words? A potential associative or even physical resemblance between sound and meaning of a word is called phonological iconicity in terms of Peirce’s typology of semiotic elements (Peirce, 1931; see Perniss et al, 2010; Aryani et al, 2013; Schmidtke et al, 2014a), challenging the conventional linguistic view that the relationship between the signifier and the signified be arbitrary (de Saussure, 1916). Note that our use of the term “sound” in this paper refers exclusively to phonological constituents of words themselves, not to speaker related issues such as prosody or the speaker’s identity or affective state (for research on the latter ones see, for example, Belin et al, 2011; Hellbernd and Sammler, 2016). This conforms with the traditional literature on sound symbolism, which posits that specific speech-sounds—phonemes—words are made of, may carry specific meaning (Jakobson, 1937; Allott, 1995). Other systematic sound-to-meaning correspondences have been found to support word learning (Nygaard et al, 2009; Lockwood et al, 2016)
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