TY - JOUR
T1 - Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning
AU - Imai, Mutsumi
AU - Kita, Sotaro
AU - Nagumo, Miho
AU - Okada, Hiroyuki
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by Ministry of Education Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (#15300088) to Imai and by Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation (5944/6131) to Kita and Imai. We thank Etsuko Haryu and Sachiyo Kajikawa for stimulating discussions and Victoria Muehleisen and Barbara Malt for thoughtful comments on earlier version of the paper. We also thank Alex Lievesley, Mamiko Arata and Izumi Honda for their help in data collection.
PY - 2008/10
Y1 - 2008/10
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Iconicity in language
KW - Scaffolding for early verb learning
KW - Sound symbolism
KW - Verb learning
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015
M3 - Article
C2 - 18835600
AN - SCOPUS:54349109514
VL - 109
SP - 54
EP - 65
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
SN - 0010-0277
IS - 1
ER -