The principle of arbitrariness in language assumes that there is no intrinsic relationship between linguistic signs and their referents. However, a growing body of sound-symbolism research suggests the existence of some naturally-biased mappings between phonological properties of labels and perceptual properties of their referents (Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006). We present new behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for the psychological reality of sound-symbolism. In a categorisation task that captures the processes involved in natural language interpretation, participants were faster to identify novel objects when label-object mappings were sound-symbolic than when they were not. Moreover, early negative EEG-waveforms indicated a sensitivity to sound-symbolic label-object associations (within 200 ms of object presentation), highlighting the non-arbitrary relation between the objects and the labels used to name them. This sensitivity to sound-symbolic label-object association...s may reflect a more general process of auditory-visual feature integration where properties of auditory stimuli facilitate a mapping to specific visual features.
TY - JOUR
AU - Ković, Vanja
AU - Plunkett, Kim
AU - Westermann, Gert
PY - 2010
UR - http://reff.f.bg.ac.rs/handle/123456789/1089
AB - The principle of arbitrariness in language assumes that there is no intrinsic relationship between linguistic signs and their referents. However, a growing body of sound-symbolism research suggests the existence of some naturally-biased mappings between phonological properties of labels and perceptual properties of their referents (Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006). We present new behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for the psychological reality of sound-symbolism. In a categorisation task that captures the processes involved in natural language interpretation, participants were faster to identify novel objects when label-object mappings were sound-symbolic than when they were not. Moreover, early negative EEG-waveforms indicated a sensitivity to sound-symbolic label-object associations (within 200 ms of object presentation), highlighting the non-arbitrary relation between the objects and the labels used to name them. This sensitivity to sound-symbolic label-object associations may reflect a more general process of auditory-visual feature integration where properties of auditory stimuli facilitate a mapping to specific visual features.
PB - Elsevier Science BV, Amsterdam
T2 - Cognition
T1 - The shape of words in the brain
EP - 28
IS - 1
SP - 19
VL - 114
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.016
ER -
@article{
author = "Ković, Vanja and Plunkett, Kim and Westermann, Gert",
year = "2010",
abstract = "The principle of arbitrariness in language assumes that there is no intrinsic relationship between linguistic signs and their referents. However, a growing body of sound-symbolism research suggests the existence of some naturally-biased mappings between phonological properties of labels and perceptual properties of their referents (Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006). We present new behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for the psychological reality of sound-symbolism. In a categorisation task that captures the processes involved in natural language interpretation, participants were faster to identify novel objects when label-object mappings were sound-symbolic than when they were not. Moreover, early negative EEG-waveforms indicated a sensitivity to sound-symbolic label-object associations (within 200 ms of object presentation), highlighting the non-arbitrary relation between the objects and the labels used to name them. This sensitivity to sound-symbolic label-object associations may reflect a more general process of auditory-visual feature integration where properties of auditory stimuli facilitate a mapping to specific visual features.",
publisher = "Elsevier Science BV, Amsterdam",
journal = "Cognition",
title = "The shape of words in the brain",
pages = "28-19",
number = "1",
volume = "114",
doi = "10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.016"
}
Ković, V., Plunkett, K.,& Westermann, G.. (2010). The shape of words in the brain. in Cognition
Elsevier Science BV, Amsterdam., 114(1), 19-28.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.016
Ković V, Plunkett K, Westermann G. The shape of words in the brain. in Cognition. 2010;114(1):19-28.
doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.016 .
Ković, Vanja, Plunkett, Kim, Westermann, Gert, "The shape of words in the brain" in Cognition, 114, no. 1 (2010):19-28,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.016 . .
