Electrophysiological signatures of English onomatopoeia

Vigliocco, Gabriella; Zhang, Ye; Maschio, Nicola Del; Todd, Rosanna; Tuomainen, Jyrki

doi:10.1017/langcog.2019.38

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 60 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In an ERP investigation of iconicity, Lockwood and Tuomainen (2015) found a more positive P2 associated with iconic stimuli, which is often associated with phonological processing and multisensory integration. In addition, Vigliocco, Zhang, Del Maschio, Todd, and Tuomainen (2020) hypothesized that an N400 effect should emerge between onomatopoeic and non-onomatopoeic words if there is a direct link between phonology and semantics for iconicity, and indeed this is what they found.…”

Section: The Role Of Phonology In Iconicity Effectsmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…As behavioural effects of iconicity in language processing tasks have been mixed, with some studies showing an effect (Meteyard et al, 2015;Sidhu et al, 2020) and others not (Peeters, 2016;Vigliocco et al, 2020), it seems fair to assume that iconicity effects in lexical processing tasks are subtle, and vulnerable to factors such as list context, task context, and individual differences among participants.…”

Section: The Role Of Phonology In Iconicity Effects 35mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Role of Phonology in Iconicity Effects: Evidence from Individual Differences

Cnudde¹,

Sidhu²,

Pm³

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Growing evidence suggests that, along with arbitrariness, non-arbitrariness exists in language. An example of this is iconicity, in which a word’s form resembles its meaning. We investigated whether phonological processing plays a key role in the facilitated processing of iconic language (i.e., in some studies the meanings of iconic words are retrieved more quickly and more accurately). First, we reanalyzed the phonological lexical decision task (PLDT) data from Experiment 2 in Sidhu, Vigliocco, and Pexman (2020), and used accuracy on pseudohomophone trials to gauge extent of phonological processing. Participants with greater pseudohomophone accuracy were found to show larger iconic facilitation. We further tested this relationship with a new PLDT experiment, and collected imitativeness ratings for 522 words in order to manipulate the imitativeness of the iconic stimuli used. We found again that individual differences in phonological processing interacted with iconic facilitation. Further, these effects were found only for imitative iconic words (i.e., onomatopoeia and ideophones), suggesting that direct imitativeness is important to iconic facilitation. These findings suggest phonology plays a key role in iconic facilitation, and that the extent to which an individual engages in phonological processing may affect the strength of observed iconicity effects.

show abstract

Section: The Role Of Phonology In Iconicity Effectsmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: The Role Of Phonology In Iconicity Effects 35mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Phonology in Iconicity Effects: Evidence from Individual Differences

Cnudde¹,

Sidhu²,

Pm³

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Similarly, reduced N400 responses for words with iconic mapping between forms and meanings relative to arbitrary words were observed in an event-related potentials (ERPs) study, which suggests a processing advantage for highly iconic words (Peeters, 2016). Larger N400 effects have also been reported for onomatopoeias preceded by arbitrary words in a semantic relatedness task, suggesting enhanced semantic processing of onomatopoeias, which in turn allows for improved detection of the mismatch between primes and targets (Vigliocco, Zhang, del Maschio, Todd, & Tuomainen, 2020). In another study, Lockwood and Tuomainen (2015) observed facilitated processing of iconic adverbs compared to arbitrary adverbs as indexed by enhanced P2 and late positive component effects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Iconicity ratings for 10,995 Spanish words and their relationship with psycholinguistic variables

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The study of iconicity, or the resemblance between word forms and their meanings, has been the focus of increasing attention in recent years. Nevertheless, there is a lack of large-scale normative studies on the iconic properties of words, which could prove crucial to expanding our understanding of form-meaning associations. In this work, we report subjective iconicity ratings for 10,995 visually presented Spanish words from 1350 participants who were asked to repeat each of the words aloud before rating them. The response reliability and the consistency between the present and previous ratings were good. The relationships between iconicity and several psycholinguistic variables were examined through multiple regression analyses. We found that sensory experience ratings were the main predictor of iconicity, and that early-acquired and more abstract words received higher iconicity scores. We also found that onomatopoeias and interjections were the most iconic words, followed by adjectives. Finally, a follow-up study was conducted in which a subsample of 360 words with different levels of iconicity from the visual presentation study was auditorily presented to the participants. A high correlation was observed between the iconicity scores in the visual and auditory presentations. The normative data provided in this database might prove useful in expanding the body of knowledge on issues such as the processing of the iconic properties of words and the role of word-form associations in the acquisition of vocabularies. The database can be downloaded from https://osf.io/v5er3/.

show abstract

“…Many such associations are found in the vocabularies of thousands of natural languages (Blasi, Wichmann, Hammerstrom, Stadler, & Christiansen, 2016). Importantly, iconicity facilitates not just word learning (for reviews, see Imai andKita, 2014, andNielsen andDingemanse, 2021) but also, according to a couple of studies, word meaning access (Peeters, 2016;Vigliocco, Zhang, Del Maschio, Todd, & Tuomainen, 2020). This suggests that iconicity might supplement a lack of distributional information.…”

Section: Phonesthemes and Iconicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Similar-sounding words flesh out fuzzy meanings

Haslett¹,

Cai²

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The distributional hypothesis (that the meaning of a word corresponds to the contexts where it occurs) struggles to explain how people represent low-frequency words. When distributional information is lacking, people utilize phonological cues, but those cues indicate broad categories, not word meanings per se. We conducted two preregistered experiments to test the hypothesis that people recruit similar-sounding words to represent and access the meanings of low-frequency words. In Experiment 1, native English speakers made semantic relatedness decisions about a cue word (e.g., dodge) followed by a non-arbitrary target (evade) that overlaps in form and meaning with an attractor word (avoid, which is semantically related to dodge) or by an arbitrary control (elude) that is matched with the non-arbitrary target on formal and distributional similarity to the cue word. As we predicted, participants decided faster and more often that non-arbitrary targets, compared to controls, were semantically related to cues. In Experiment 2, participants made semantic relatedness decisions about sentences containing the same cue and target words (e.g., The kids dodged something and She tried to evade/elude the officer). We used MouseView.js to blur the sentences and create a fovea-like aperture directed by the participant’s cursor, allowing us to measure fixation duration. While we did not observe the predicted difference between non-arbitrary and arbitrary targets themselves, we found a lag effect, with shorter fixations on words following non-arbitrary targets, indicating an advantage in accessing the meanings of non-arbitrary words. These experiments provide evidence that similar-sounding words bolster mental representations of low-frequency words.

show abstract

Electrophysiological signatures of English onomatopoeia

Cited by 14 publications

References 60 publications

The Role of Phonology in Iconicity Effects: Evidence from Individual Differences

The Role of Phonology in Iconicity Effects: Evidence from Individual Differences

Iconicity ratings for 10,995 Spanish words and their relationship with psycholinguistic variables

Similar-sounding words flesh out fuzzy meanings

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About