How arbitrary is language?

Monaghan, Padraic; Shillcock, Richard; Christiansen, Morten H.; Kirby, Simon

doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0299

Cited by 221 publications

(323 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Furthermore, in a large-scale corpus analysis, Monaghan et al [34] demonstrated that sound-meaning mappings in the English lexicon are more systematic than would be expected by chance. That is, subtle sound symbolism, which people do not consciously detect, may exist throughout the conventional (i.e.…”

Section: Sound Symbolism Is Not Peripheral In Modern Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution

Imai

Kita

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

321

402

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Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis , claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture.

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Section: Sound Symbolism Is Not Peripheral In Modern Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution

Imai

Kita

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

321

402

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Many past studies on the relationship between form and meaning in language (Shillcock et al, 2001;Monaghan et al, 2014;Gutiérrez et al, 2016;Dautriche et al, 2017) mitigated this concern by only considering monomorphemic words, discarding a large fraction of the lexicon in the process.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering Phonesthemes with Sparse Regularization

Liu¹,

Levow²,

Smith³

2018

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Subword/Character LEvel Models

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We introduce a simple method for extracting non-arbitrary form-meaning representations from a collection of semantic vectors. We treat the problem as one of feature selection for a model trained to predict word vectors from subword features. We apply this model to the problem of automatically discovering phonesthemes, which are submorphemic sound clusters that appear in words with similar meaning. Many of our model-predicted phonesthemes overlap with those proposed in the linguistics literature, and we validate our approach with human judgments.

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“…This is illustrative of the point to follow, that most words contain a combination of arbitrary, systematic, and iconic elements. We chose fun because of its low iconicity rating (Winter, Perry, Perlman, & Lupyan, 2017) and derived systematicity value (Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, & Kirby, 2014). Its length is also atypical of abstract nouns, which tend to be longer than concrete ones (Reilly & Kean, 2007), though this raises the interesting question of whether antisystematic words are arbitrary.…”

Section: Arbitrariness and Nonarbitrarinessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

2017

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Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (e.g., objects of a certain size or shape). Some of the best-known examples include the mil/mal effect (Sapir, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239, 1929) and the maluma/takete effect (Köhler, 1929). Interest in this topic has been on the rise within psychology, and studies have demonstrated that sound symbolic effects are relevant for many facets of cognition, including language, action, memory, and categorization. Sound symbolism also provides a mechanism by which words' forms can have nonarbitrary, iconic relationships with their meanings. Although various proposals have been put forth for how phonetic features (both acoustic and articulatory) come to be associated with stimuli, there is as yet no generally agreed-upon explanation. We review five proposals: statistical co-occurrence between phonetic features and associated stimuli in the environment, a shared property among phonetic features and stimuli; neural factors; species-general, evolved associations; and patterns extracted from language. We identify a number of outstanding questions that need to be addressed on this topic and suggest next steps for the field.

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How arbitrary is language?

Cited by 221 publications

References 51 publications

The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution

The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution

Discovering Phonesthemes with Sparse Regularization

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

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