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The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies

Natural language contains many examples of sound‐symbolism, where the form of the word carries information about its meaning. Such systematicity is more prevalent in the words children acquire first, but arbitrariness dominates during later vocabulary development. Furthermore, systematicity appears...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Brand, James, Monaghan, Padraic, Walker, Peter
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6001752/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29235140
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12565
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author Brand, James
Monaghan, Padraic
Walker, Peter
author_facet Brand, James
Monaghan, Padraic
Walker, Peter
author_sort Brand, James
collection PubMed
description Natural language contains many examples of sound‐symbolism, where the form of the word carries information about its meaning. Such systematicity is more prevalent in the words children acquire first, but arbitrariness dominates during later vocabulary development. Furthermore, systematicity appears to promote learning category distinctions, which may become more important as the vocabulary grows. In this study, we tested the relative costs and benefits of sound‐symbolism for word learning as vocabulary size varies. Participants learned form‐meaning mappings for words which were either congruent or incongruent with regard to sound‐symbolic relations. For the smaller vocabulary, sound‐symbolism facilitated learning individual words, whereas for larger vocabularies sound‐symbolism supported learning category distinctions. The changing properties of form‐meaning mappings according to vocabulary size may reflect the different ways in which language is learned at different stages of development.
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spelling pubmed-60017522018-06-21 The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies Brand, James Monaghan, Padraic Walker, Peter Cogn Sci Brief Reports Natural language contains many examples of sound‐symbolism, where the form of the word carries information about its meaning. Such systematicity is more prevalent in the words children acquire first, but arbitrariness dominates during later vocabulary development. Furthermore, systematicity appears to promote learning category distinctions, which may become more important as the vocabulary grows. In this study, we tested the relative costs and benefits of sound‐symbolism for word learning as vocabulary size varies. Participants learned form‐meaning mappings for words which were either congruent or incongruent with regard to sound‐symbolic relations. For the smaller vocabulary, sound‐symbolism facilitated learning individual words, whereas for larger vocabularies sound‐symbolism supported learning category distinctions. The changing properties of form‐meaning mappings according to vocabulary size may reflect the different ways in which language is learned at different stages of development. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2017-12-12 2018-05 /pmc/articles/PMC6001752/ /pubmed/29235140 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12565 Text en Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Cognitive Science Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Brief Reports
Brand, James
Monaghan, Padraic
Walker, Peter
The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies
title The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies
title_full The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies
title_fullStr The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies
title_full_unstemmed The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies
title_short The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies
title_sort changing role of sound‐symbolism for small versus large vocabularies
topic Brief Reports
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6001752/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29235140
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12565
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