Sound symbolism facilitates word learning in 14-month-olds.

Mutsumi Imai,Shohei Hidaka,Katerina Kantartzis,Michiko Miyazaki,Hiroyuki Okada,H Henny Yeung,Sotaro Kita,Andrew Bremner

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0116494

Abstract

Sound symbolism, or the nonarbitrary link between linguistic sound and meaning, has often been discussed in connection with language evolution, where the oral imitation of external events links phonetic forms with their referents (e.g., Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may also facilitate synchronic language learning in human infants. Sound symbolism may be a useful cue particularly at the earliest developmental stages of word learning, because it potentially provides a way of bootstrapping word meaning from perceptual information. Using an associative word learning paradigm, we demonstrated that 14-month-old infants could detect Köhler-type (1947) shape-sound symbolism, and could use this sensitivity in their effort to establish a word-referent association.

Highlights

Traditional linguistics has long assumed that links between a word’s form and meaning are arbitrary [1]
We modeled the probability of looking at an object as a function of its various properties: the three experimental factors, whose influence was assumed to change as a function of time within a trial, two subsidiary preference factors, assumed to be constant over time
Through the process of model fitting, we estimated a set of parameters for all of the five factors described above, but we report only the experiment-relevant factors here (i. e., training, sound-symbolic match at test, and training-sound-symbolism interaction factors)

Summary

Introduction

Traditional linguistics has long assumed that links between a word’s form and meaning are arbitrary [1]. Words whose forms are motivated by their meanings (i.e., sound symbolic words) are commonly found across many languages of the world. Bump and thump sound like what they mean: an event with an abrupt end [2]. Several languages even have large grammatically defined lexical classes of sound symbolic words (i.e., “ideophones,” “expressives,” or “mimetics”) [4,5]. A classic example of sound symbolism is the association between rounded vs angular shapes and labels [6,7]. Presented with a forced choice, adults and children from different languages (e.g., German, English, and Swahili) much prefer to label rounded objects maluma and angular objects takete [8,9]

Methods

Results

Conclusion