18 research outputs found
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The Specificity of Non-Arbitrary Sound-to-Meaning Correspondences in Spoken Language
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Eye Movements Reveal Sensitivity to Sound Symbolism Early and Late in Word Learning
Although the relationship between sound and meaning in
language is arbitrary, reliable correspondences between sound
and meaning have been found in natural language. These
sound symbolic relationships affect word learning, but less is
known about how sound symbolism affects online processing
during learning or for well-learned stimuli. We use the visual
world paradigm and an artificial lexicon featuring carefully
controlled sound symbolic correspondences to examine the
effects of sound symbolism on the online processing of novel
and well-learned stimuli. Initially, participants chose novel
shapes matching the sound symbolic properties of the word
above chance, reliably fixating consistent shapes around word
offset. As learning approached ceiling, accuracy and reaction
time differences between matching and mismatching stimuli
disappeared but a disadvantage in the online processing of
mismatching stimuli persisted in the form of lagging target
fixations. This suggests that sound symbolism affects the
online processing of spoken stimuli even for well-learned
words
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Sound to Meaning Mappings in the Bouba-Kiki Effect
Sound to meaning correspondences in spoken language are
assumed to be largely arbitrary. However, research has
identified a number of exceptions to the arbitrariness
assumption. In particular, non-arbitrary mappings between
sound and shape, the bouba/kiki effect, have been
documented across diverse languages and both children and
adults are sensitive to this type of sound symbolic mapping.
The cognitive basis for the associations between nonword
labels and particular shapes remains poorly understood
making it difficult to predict how findings generalize beyond
the limited stimuli tested. To identify systematic bases for
sound-to-shape mappings, we collected ratings of
roundedness and pointedness for a large database of
pseudowords. We find that attributes of both consonants and
vowels are systematically related to judged shape meanings
of pseudowords, and offer hypotheses as to the cognitive
mechanisms underlying the observed pattern
Using the Implicit Association Test to Investigate the Strength of Synesthetic Associations
Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which experiences in one sensory or cognitive domain are associated with automatic, involuntary experiences in a second domain. The present study investigated the relationship between the consistency and strength of these associations in grapheme-color synesthesia, in which a specific color is experienced when seeing a particular letter or number. Firstly, synesthetic participants completed the online Synesthesia Battery (SB) which measures the consistency with which individuals choose the same color for the same grapheme and returns a standardized score which distinguishes genuine synesthetes from non-synesthetes. Secondly, synesthetes and age/gender-matched non-synesthetic control participants completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) which measures the strength of associations. In the IAT, two response keys were paired with the synesthetes’ two most consistent SB associations in either congruent (each key is associated with a grapheme and its correct synesthetic color, e.g., A + red, B + green) or incongruent (i.e., A + green, B + red) conditions. However, on each trial, only a single grapheme or color is presented and participants make speeded responses. We expected that synesthetes would respond more quickly and accurately when their grapheme/color associations were paired congruently (e.g., A/red, B/blue) as opposed to incongruently (i.e., A/blue, B/red). In contrast, non-synesthetic controls should show no significant difference between congruent and incongruent trials because they do not have pre-existing associations between graphemes and colors. To the extent that strong associations should also be consistent, we also expected a positive correlation between SB scores and congruency magnitudes in the synesthetes
The Handbook of Speech Perception
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/all_books/1525/thumbnail.jp
Prosody in speech as a source of referential information
<p>Although prosody has primarily been assumed to convey information regarding linguistic structure and speakers’ emotional state, increasing evidence suggests that prosody also conveys <i>referential</i> details. We examined the extent to which language users produce and infer information from prosodic correlates to perceptual details in the visual modality, specifically colour brightness. In Experiments 1 and 2, speakers labelled colours that varied in brightness with either familiar colour names (e.g. red; Exp. 1) or novel words (e.g. blicket; Exp. 2). Speakers used higher pitch, shorter duration, and higher amplitude for novel words, but not for familiar colour names, when labelling brighter versus darker shades. Listeners in Experiment 3 reliably inferred the intended target colour referent from the recorded utterances obtained in Experiment 2. Findings suggest that prosody reflects cross-modal correspondences between auditory and visual domains and, like a type of vocal gesture, provides an additional channel of information that resolves referential ambiguity.</p