title: Ideophones in Japanese modulate the P2 and late positive complex responses.
abstract: Sound-symbolism, or the direct link between sound and meaning, is typologically and behaviorally attested across languages. However, neuroimaging research has mostly focused on artificial non-words or individual segments, which do not represent sound-symbolism in natural language. We used EEG to compare Japanese ideophones, which are phonologically distinctive sound-symbolic lexical words, and arbitrary adverbs during a sentence reading task. Ideophones elicit a larger visual P2 response than arbitrary adverbs, as well as a sustained late positive complex. Our results and previous literature suggest that the larger P2 may indicate the integration of sound and sensory information by association in response to the distinctive phonology of ideophones. The late positive complex may reflect the facilitated lexical retrieval of arbitrary words in comparison to ideophones. This account provides new evidence that ideophones exhibit similar cross-modal correspondences to those which have been proposed for non-words and individual sounds.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurobiology of Language, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen Netherlands ; Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London UK.
authors.forename: Gwilym
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lockwood
authors.affiliation: Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London UK.
authors.forename: Jyrki
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tuomainen
keywords: Japanese; P2; cross-modal correspondence; event-related potential; ideophone; sound-symbolism; synaesthesia/synesthesia