Rights statement: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Brand, J. , Monaghan, P. and Walker, P. (2018), The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies. Cogn Sci, 42: 578-590. doi:10.1111/cogs.12565 which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cogs.12565/abstract This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
Accepted author manuscript, 4.83 MB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - The changing role of sound symbolism for small versus large vocabularies
AU - Brand, James
AU - Monaghan, Padraic
AU - Walker, Peter
N1 - This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Brand, J. , Monaghan, P. and Walker, P. (2018), The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies. Cogn Sci, 42: 578-590. doi:10.1111/cogs.12565 which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cogs.12565/abstract This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance With Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.
PY - 2018/5/1
Y1 - 2018/5/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - SOUND SYMBOLISM
KW - LANGUAGE LEARNING
KW - VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT
KW - LANGUAGE EVOLUTION
U2 - 10.1111/cogs.12565
DO - 10.1111/cogs.12565
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 29235140
VL - 42 Suppl 2
SP - 578
EP - 590
JO - Cognitive Science
JF - Cognitive Science
SN - 0364-0213
IS - Suppl. 2
ER -