The shape of words in the brain.
The principle of arbitrariness in language assumes that there is no intrinsic relationship between linguistic signs and their referents. However, a growing body of sound-symbolism research suggests the existence of some naturally-biased mappings between phonological properties of labels and perceptual properties of their referents (Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006). We present new behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for the psychological reality of sound-symbolism. In a categorisation task that captures the processes involved in natural language interpretation, participants were faster to identify novel objects when label-object mappings were sound-symbolic than when they were not. Moreover, early negative EEG-waveforms indicated a sensitivity to sound-symbolic label-object associations (within 200ms of object presentation), highlighting the non-arbitrary relation between the objects and the labels used to name them. This sensitivity to sound-symbolic label-object associations may reflect a more general process of auditory-visual feature integration where properties of auditory stimuli facilitate a mapping to specific visual features.
Kovic
Vanja
V
Department of Psychology, University of Novi Sad, Dr. Zorana Djindjica, 21000 Novi Sad, Serbia. vkovic@ff.uns.ac.rs
Plunkett
Kim
K
Westermann
Gert
G
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D001307:Auditory Perception; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D007802:Language; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013561:Symbolism