The development of phonemic-iconic congruency: children's performance in naming task

Abstract

In previous experiments we used choice and visualization tasks to study the development of phonemic-iconic congruency and confirmed the phenomenon at all age-groups, starting from 5 year olds. The strength of the effect increases with age and is dependent of the type of the task performed (Jankovic, 2006 Perception 35 Supplement, 90). In this study we analyze the development of the phonemic ^ iconic congruency in the naming task. Three groups of respondents (9, 14, and 19 years) were asked to produce pseudowords corresponding to presented monochromatic abstract visual patterns. Visual patterns were varied according to the following dimensions: sharp/oval, dark/light, simple/complex, and compact/disperse. The corpus of 1875 pseudowords per visual pattern was obtained. The results confirmed the phonemic ^ iconic congruency phenomenon at all ages in this type of task, ie the distribution of phonemes and consonant-vowel patterns in pseudowords produced for abstract visual patterns strongly depends on physical characteristics of visual patterns. The results also showed increase in the strength of the effect with age