Sound symbolism facilitates word learning in 14-month-olds

Sound symbolism, or the nonarbitrary link between linguistic sound and meaning, has often been discussed in connection with language evolution, where the oral imitation of external events links phonetic forms with their referents (e.g., Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). In this research, we explore...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2015-02, Vol.10 (2), p.e0116494-e0116494
Main Authors: Imai, Mutsumi, Miyazaki, Michiko, Yeung, H Henny, Hidaka, Shohei, Kantartzis, Katerina, Okada, Hiroyuki, Kita, Sotaro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Babies
Bootstrapping
Brain research
Cognition & reasoning
Developmental stages
Experimental psychology
Female
Humans
Hypothesis testing
Infant
Infants
Language
Language acquisition
Language Development
Learning
Male
Native language acquisition
Onomatopoeia
Origin of language
Perceptions
Phonetics
Phonology
Psychology
Science
Semantics
Sound
Symbolism
Verbal Learning - physiology
Vocabulary learning
Word meaning
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Summary:Sound symbolism, or the nonarbitrary link between linguistic sound and meaning, has often been discussed in connection with language evolution, where the oral imitation of external events links phonetic forms with their referents (e.g., Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may also facilitate synchronic language learning in human infants. Sound symbolism may be a useful cue particularly at the earliest developmental stages of word learning, because it potentially provides a way of bootstrapping word meaning from perceptual information. Using an associative word learning paradigm, we demonstrated that 14-month-old infants could detect Köhler-type (1947) shape-sound symbolism, and could use this sensitivity in their effort to establish a word-referent association.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0116494