Indeed, this has often been taken as the default. One possibility is that form and meaning are arbitrarily related, such that form provides no reliable cue to meaning. Together these results add to our understanding of the importance of non-arbitrariness in language.Īrbitrariness, iconicity and systematicityĭoes the form of a word provide cues to its meaning? Moreover, are individuals sensitive to these cues? These are fundamental questions about the nature of language that cut across both linguistics and cognitive psychology. Finally, while previous studies have looked at effects of arbitrary and non-arbitrary mappings contained in a single stimulus, this is the first study to demonstrate that different kinds of non-arbitrary mappings can have an effect when appearing in the same stimulus. The results also show that sound symbolism can emerge in stimuli with existing associated information (i.e., endings indicative of grammatical gender, and the association that they evoke). These results demonstrate that speakers of a language with grammatical gender associate different properties to words belonging to different genders. As predicted, the English speakers showed no effects of grammatical gender, while the French speakers did. This was repeated using auditory presentation with both an English-speaking (Experiment 2a) and French-speaking (Experiment 2b) sample. French speakers also associated nonwords containing round-sounding (sharp-sounding) phonemes with round (sharp) shapes. ![]() ![]() In Experiment 1, we found that French speakers associated nonwords containing feminine (masculine) endings with round (sharp) shapes. ![]() We manipulated these two elements orthogonally, allowing us to examine the effect of each. Here we investigated two sources of non-arbitrariness: systematicity (via grammatical gender) and iconicity (via shape sound symbolism). While the arbitrariness of language has long been considered one of its defining features, there is growing evidence that non-arbitrariness also plays an important role.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |