Feeling, emotion and the company they keep: what adjectives reveal about the substantives

Béligon, Stéphanie

doi:10.4000/lexis.4322

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…We found that adjectives were the most typical forms for positive valence, which is also the case for English (de Zubicaray et al, 2023). This can be considered consistent with the use of adjectives to directly reference immediate feelings and emotional states (e.g., Béligon, 2020;Galati et al, 2008;Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021). In addition, these forms tended to be acquired earlier in life.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

“…However, neither controlled for affective rating disagreement or redundant affixes or investigated positioning of syllabic stress or variation according to grammatical class. For example, various authors have noted that adjectives directly reference immediate feelings and emotional states (e.g., Béligon, 2020;Galati et al, 2008;Pérez-Sánchez et al, 2021). In English, adjectives are reported to comprise the most typical forms for positive valence (de Zubicaray et al, 2023).…”

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Statistical Relationships Between Phonological Form, Emotional Valence and Arousal of Spanish Words

de Zubicaray,

Hinojosa

2024

Journal of Cognition

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A number of studies have provided evidence of limited non-arbitrary associations between the phonological forms and meanings of affective words, a finding referred to as affective sound symbolism. Here, we explored whether the affective connotations of Spanish words might have more extensive statistical relationships with phonological/ phonetic features, or affective form typicality. After eliminating words with poor affective rating agreement and morphophonological redundancies (e.g., negating prefixes), we found evidence of significant form typicality for emotional valence, emotionality, and arousal in a large sample of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. These affective form-meaning mappings remained significant even when controlling for a range of lexico-semantic variables. We show that affective variables and their corresponding form typicality measures are able to significantly predict lexical decision performance using a megastudy dataset. Overall, our findings provide new evidence that affective form typicality is a statistical property of the Spanish lexicon.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

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confidence: 99%

Statistical Relationships Between Phonological Form, Emotional Valence and Arousal of Spanish Words

de Zubicaray,

Hinojosa

2024

Journal of Cognition

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“…The combined results for valence and extremity of valence suggest nasals in the initial phoneme might be more likely to signal neutral emotion unless the word also includes stress on that phoneme and/or additional features. Interestingly, adjectives were the most form-typical lexical category, which is perhaps not surprising given their roles in directly referencing emotional states and feelings (e.g., Béligon, 2020). However, the overall proportion of variance explained by surface form variables ( 2%) was quite modest compared to those reported for noun/verb status (12.4%; Sharpe & Marantz, 2017), sensory experience (12.3%; G. de Zubicaray, and semantic size ratings (20%; G. I. de Zubicaray, .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion from the sound of a word: Statistical relationships between surface form and valence of English words influence lexical access and memory.

de Zubicaray,

McMahon,

Arciuli

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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It is generally accepted that a word's emotional valence (i.e., whether a word is perceived as positive, negative, or neutral) influences how it is accessed and remembered. There is also evidence that the affective content of some words is represented in nonarbitrary sound-meaning associations (i.e., emotional sound symbolism). We investigated whether more extensive statistical relationships exist between the surface form properties of English words and ratings of their emotional valence, that is, form typicality. We found significant form typicality for both valence and extremity of valence (the absolute distance from the midpoint of the rating scale, regardless of polarity). Next, using behavioral megastudy data sets, we show that measures of emotional form typicality are significant predictors of lexical access during written and auditory lexical decision and reading aloud tasks in addition to recognition memory performance. These findings show nonarbitrary form-valence mappings in English are accessed automatically during language and verbal memory processing. We discuss how these findings might be incorporated into theoretical accounts that implement Bayesian statistical inference. Public Significance StatementFor over a century, language researchers have generally assumed that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is entirely arbitrary. Our study shows there are systematic associations between the emotional valence of English words and their sound features. We also show that these emotional sound-meaning associations influence language processing and memory.

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Feeling, emotion and the company they keep: what adjectives reveal about the substantives

Abstract: Feeling, emotion and the company they keep: what adjectives reveal about the ...

Cited by 2 publications

References 3 publications

Statistical Relationships Between Phonological Form, Emotional Valence and Arousal of Spanish Words

Statistical Relationships Between Phonological Form, Emotional Valence and Arousal of Spanish Words

Emotion from the sound of a word: Statistical relationships between surface form and valence of English words influence lexical access and memory.

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