Effects of iconicity in lexical decision (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Role of Phonology in Iconicity Effects: Evidence from Individual Differences
2020
Growing evidence suggests that, along with arbitrariness, non-arbitrariness exists in language. An example of this is iconicity, in which a word's form resembles its meaning. We investigated whether phonological processing plays a key role in the facilitated processing of iconic language (i.e., in some studies the meanings of iconic words are retrieved more quickly and more accurately). First, we reanalyzed the phonological lexical decision task (PLDT) data from Experiment 2 in Sidhu, Vigliocco, and Pexman (2020), and used accuracy on pseudohomophone trials to gauge extent of phonological processing. Participants with greater pseudohomophone accuracy were found to show larger iconic facilitation. We further tested this relationship with a new PLDT experiment, and collected imitativeness ratings for 522 words in order to manipulate the imitativeness of the iconic stimuli used. We found again that individual differences in phonological processing interacted with iconic facilitation. Further, these effects were found only for imitative iconic words (i.e., onomatopoeia and ideophones), suggesting that direct imitativeness is important to iconic facilitation. These findings suggest phonology plays a key role in iconic facilitation, and that the extent to which an individual engages in phonological processing may affect the strength of observed iconicity effects.
Iconicity in word learning and beyond: A critical review
2018
Interest in iconicity (the resemblance-based mapping between aspects of form and meaning) is in the midst of a resurgence, and a prominent focus in the field has been the possible role of iconicity in language learning. Here we critically review theory and empirical findings in this domain. We distinguish local learning enhancement (where iconicity influences learning at the level of individual iconic lexical items) and general learning enhancement (where iconicity influences the later learning of non-iconic items or systems). We find that evidence for local learning enhancement is quite strong, though not as clear cut as it is often described. Despite common claims about broader facilitatory effects of iconicity on learning, we find that current evidence for general learning enhancement is lacking. We suggest a number of productive avenues for future research and specify what types of evidence would be required to show a role for iconicity general learning enhancement. We also revi...
Iconicity emerges and is maintained in spoken language
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2021
Iconicity is the property whereby signs (vocal or manual) resemble their referents. Iconic signs are easy to relate to the world, facilitating learning, and processing. Here we examine whether the benefits of iconicity will lead to its emergence and to maintenance in language. We focus on shape iconicity (the association between rounded objects and roundsounding words like bouba; and between spiky objects and spiky-sounding words like kiki) and motion iconicity (the association between longer words and longer events). In Experiment 1 participants generated novel labels for round vs. spiky shapes, and long vs. short movements (1a: text, 1b: speech). Labels for each kind of stimulus differed in a way that was consistent with previous studies of iconicity. This suggests that iconicity emerges even on a completely unconstrainted task. In Experiment 2 (2a: text, 2b: speech), we simulate language change in the laboratory (as iterated learning) and show that both forms of iconicity are introduced and maintained through generations of language users. Thus, we demonstrate emergence of iconicity in spoken languages and we argue that these results reflect a pressure for language systems to be referential which favours iconic forms in the cultural evolution of language (at least up to a point where it is balanced by other pressures, e.g., discriminability). This can explain why we have iconicity across natural languages and may have implications for debates on language origins.
Iconicity in English Vocabulary and its Relation to Toddlers' Word Learning
Cognitive Science, 2015
Scholars have documented substantial classes of iconic vocabulary in many non-Indo-European languages. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English are assumed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments, we asked English speakers to rate the iconicity of words from the MacArthurBates Communicative Developmental Inventory. We found English—contrary to common belief—exhibits iconicity that correlates with age of acquisition and differs across lexical classes. Words judged as most iconic are learned earlier, in accord with findings that iconic words are easier to learn. We also find that adjectives and verbs are more iconic than nouns, supporting the idea that iconicity provides an extra cue in learning more difficult abstract meanings. Our results provide new evidence for a relationship between iconicity and word learning and suggest iconicity may be a more pervasive property of spoken languages than previously thought.
When semantics aids phonology: A processing advantage for iconic word forms in aphasia
Neuropsychologia, 2015
Iconicity is the non-arbitrary relation between properties of a phonological form and semantic content (e.g. "moo", "splash"). It is a common feature of both spoken and signed languages, and recent evidence shows that iconic forms confer an advantage during word learning. We explored whether iconic forms conferred a processing advantage for 13 individuals with aphasia following left-hemisphere stroke. Iconic and control words were compared in four different tasks: repetition, reading aloud, auditory lexical decision and visual lexical decision. An advantage for iconic words was seen for some individuals in all tasks, with consistent group effects emerging in reading aloud and auditory lexical decision. Both these tasks rely on mapping between semantics and phonology. We conclude that iconicity aids spoken word processing for individuals with aphasia. This advantage is due to a stronger connection between semantic information and phonological forms. (L. Meteyard).
2021
The study of iconicity, i.e., of a link between form and meaning in a word based on similarity, has gained increased attention in recent years. Although recent research has shown an important role of iconicity for first language acquisition, its role for the second language (L2) acquisition is still unclear, neither is it understood how the perception of imitative words depends on their iconic expressiveness. We applied a multivariate experimental plan with repeated measurements and experimental and control stimuli to study visual recognition of English iconic (imitative) words at four stages of de-iconization (SDs) by native speakers of Russian (N = 106) using a lexical decision task. The participants were presented with an experimental stimulus and had to decide as rapidly as possible whether a visually presented letter string was a word or not. The method of diachronic evaluation was used to group the pre-selected imitative words into four categories where SD-1 words are the most...
Semantic Associations Dominate Over Perceptual Associations in Vowel- Size Iconicity
i-Perception, 2019
We tested the influence of perceptual features on semantic associations between the acoustic characteristics of vowels and the notion of size. To this end, we designed an experiment in which we manipulated size on two dissociable levels: the physical size of the pictures presented during the experiment (perceptual level) and the implied size of the objects depicted in the pictures (semantic level). Participants performed an Implicit Association Test in which the pictures of small objects were larger than those of large objects-that is, the actual size ratio on the semantic level was inverted on the perceptual level. Our results suggest that participants matched visual and acoustic stimuli in accordance with the content of the pictures (i.e., the inferred size of the depicted object), whereas directly perceivable features (i.e., the physical size of the picture) had only a marginal influence on participants' performance. Moreover, as the experiment has been conducted at two different sites (Japan and Germany), the results also suggest that the participants' cultural background or mother tongue had only a negligible influence on the effect. Our results, therefore, support the assumption that associations across sensory modalities can be motivated by the semantic interpretation of presemantic stimuli.
Iconicity ratings for 10,995 Spanish words and their relationship with psycholinguistic variables
Behavior Research Methods
The study of iconicity, or the resemblance between word forms and their meanings, has been the focus of increasing attention in recent years. Nevertheless, there is a lack of large-scale normative studies on the iconic properties of words, which could prove crucial to expanding our understanding of form-meaning associations. In this work, we report subjective iconicity ratings for 10,995 visually presented Spanish words from 1350 participants who were asked to repeat each of the words aloud before rating them. The response reliability and the consistency between the present and previous ratings were good. The relationships between iconicity and several psycholinguistic variables were examined through multiple regression analyses. We found that sensory experience ratings were the main predictor of iconicity, and that early-acquired and more abstract words received higher iconicity scores. We also found that onomatopoeias and interjections were the most iconic words, followed by adjectives. Finally, a follow-up study was conducted in which a subsample of 360 words with different levels of iconicity from the visual presentation study was auditorily presented to the participants. A high correlation was observed between the iconicity scores in the visual and auditory presentations. The normative data provided in this database might prove useful in expanding the body of knowledge on issues such as the processing of the iconic properties of words and the role of word-form associations in the acquisition of vocabularies. The database can be downloaded from https://osf.io/v5er3/.
2019
We tested the hypothesis that phonosemantic iconicity-i.e., a motivated resonance of sound and meaning-might not only be found on the level of individual words or entire texts, but also in word combinations such that the meaning of a target word is iconically expressed, or highlighted, in the phonetic properties of its immediate verbal context. To this end, we extracted single lines from German poems that all include a word designating high or low dominance, such as large or small, strong or weak, etc. Based on insights from previous studies, we expected to find more vowels with a relatively short distance between the first two formants (low formant dispersion) in the immediate context of words expressing high physical or social dominance than in the context of words expressing low dominance. Our findings support this hypothesis, suggesting that neighboring words can form iconic dyads in which the meaning of one word is sound-iconically reflected in the phonetic properties of adjacent words. The construct of a contiguity-based phono-semantic iconicity opens many venues for future research well beyond lines extracted from poems.
Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing
Cognitive Science, 2023
Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants' are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task-a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective-meaning pairs-indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow-up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives.