Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning.
Some words are sound-symbolic in that they involve a non-arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning. Here, we report that 25-month-old children are sensitive to cross-linguistically valid sound-symbolic matches in the domain of action and that this sound symbolism facilitates verb learning in young children. We constructed a set of novel sound-symbolic verbs whose sounds were judged to match certain actions better than others, as confirmed by adult Japanese- as well as English speakers, and by 2- and 3-year-old Japanese-speaking children. These sound-symbolic verbs, together with other novel non-sound-symbolic verbs, were used in a verb learning task with 3-year-old Japanese children. In line with the previous literature, 3-year-olds could not generalize the meaning of novel non-sound-symbolic verbs on the basis of the sameness of action. However, 3-year-olds could correctly generalize the meaning of novel sound-symbolic verbs. These results suggest that iconic scaffolding by means of sound symbolism plays an important role in early verb learning.
Imai
Mutsumi
M
Department of Environmental Information, Keio University at Shonan-Fujisawa, Endo, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan. imai@sfc.keio.ac.jp
Kita
Sotaro
S
Nagumo
Miho
M
Okada
Hiroyuki
H
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D013016:Sound; D013561:Symbolism; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary