The development of spontaneous sound-shape matching in monolingual and bilingual infants during the first year.

Abstract

Abstract:Recently it has been proposed that sensitivity to non-arbitrary relationships between speech sounds and objects potentially bootstraps lexical acquisition. However, it is currently unclear whether preverbal infants (e.g., before 6 months of age) with different linguistic profiles are sensitive to such non-arbitrary relationships. Here, we assessed 4-and 12-month-old Basque monolingual and Spanish-Basque bilingual infants' sensitivity to cross-modal correspondences between sound symbolic non-words without syllable repetition ('buba', 'kike') and drawings of rounded and angular shapes. Our findings demonstrate that sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences emerge by 12 months of age in both monolinguals and bilinguals. This finding suggests that spontaneous soundshape matching is likely to be the product of language learning and development and may not be readily available prior to the onset of word learning.

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

“…One approach would be to examine whether the relevant associations are present universally, and from a very young age. While there is evidence for sensitivity to the mil/mal effect (Peña et al, 2011) and the maluma/takete effect (Ozturk et al, 2013) in four month-old infants, it is notable that two other studies have failed to find evidence of infant sensitivity to the maluma/takete effect at that age (Fort et al, 2014;Pejovic & Molnar, 2016). In addition, one might debate whether observing an effect at four months of age is sufficient to infer its innateness.…”

“…However, given that sound symbolic effects emerge in a culture without a writing system (Bremner et al, 2013), in preliterate infants (Ozturk et al, 2013;Peña et al, 2011;cf. Fort et al, 2013;Pejovic & Molnar, 2016), with learned neutral orthographies (Hung et al, 2017), and are not affected by direct manipulations of font (Sidhu, Pexman, & Saint-Aubin, 2016), it seems probable that orthography is, as the very least, not the sole contributor to these effects. Nevertheless the contribution of orthography relative to those of acoustics and articulation is still an open question.…”

“…Rogers & Ross, 1975) and in the looking times of 4-month-old infants (Ozturk et al, 2013;cf. Fort, Weiß, Martin, & Peperkamp, 2013;Pejovic & Molnar, 2016).…”

Symbouki: a meta‐analysis on the emergence of sound symbolism in early language acquisition

“…Two of the four articles with this design (Asano et al., ; Fort et al., ) interpreted a preference for sound symbolically matching compared to mismatching sound–shape correspondences (thus, longer looking times or higher peak ERP amplitudes) as an indicator of sensitivity to sound symbolism. However, two others (Ozturk et al., ; Pejovic & Molnar, ) interpreted the reverse, namely a preference for mismatching correspondences, as an indicator for sensitivity to sound symbolism. Indeed, the problem of not being able to predict which direction of preference infants will show is inherent to designs relying on infants’ direction of preference (Bergmann & Cristia, ).…”

“…Finally, several other studies (published and unpublished) failed to replicate the finding that infants are sensitive to the bouba-kiki effect early on in development (Fort, Weiss, Martin, & Peperkamp, 2013;Fort, Guevara-Rukoz, & Peperkamp, 2015;Lammertink et al, 2015;Pejovic & Molnar, 2017;Starr & Brannon, 2012). In order to shed light on this discrepancy, we aimed to provide more general insights into the emergence of the bouba-kiki effect in early language development.…”