The shape of words in the brain |
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| Authors: | Vanja Kovic Kim Plunkett Gert Westermann |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Psychology, University of Novi Sad, Dr. Zorana Djindjica, 21000 Novi Sad, Serbia;2. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Rd., Oxford OX1 3UD, UK;3. Department of Psychology, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford OX3 0BP, UK;1. Department of Psychology, Developmental and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA 02125, USA;2. Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada;3. Division of Epidemiology, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5T 3M7, Canada;1. School of Business, 4 Nethergate, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK;2. Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;3. Deparment of Food Management, Miyagi University, Japan |
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| Abstract: | 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 200 ms 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. |
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