The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes

Bergen, Benjamin

doi:10.1353/lan.2004.0056

Cited by 269 publications

(211 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…I will show that when one compares individual phonemes within the entire system, not just in isolation within a single lexical item, the same types of distributional tendencies found in spoken language phonology (Abelin 1999;Bergen 2004;Magnus 2001;Winter 2016) are seen in the phoneme inventory of ASL and Libras.…”

Section: Setting the Stagementioning

confidence: 81%

Language comprehenders represent object distance both visually and auditorily

Winter

Bergen

2012

Lang Cognition

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Abstract. While the arbitrariness of the sign has occupied a central space in linguistic theory for a century, counter-evidence to this basic tenet has been mounting. Recent findings from cross-linguistic studies on spoken languages have suggested that, contrary to purely arbitrary distributions of phonological content, languages often exhibit systematic and regular phonological and sub-phonological patterns of form-meaning mappings. To date, studies of distributional tendencies of this kind have not been conducted for signed languages.In an investigation of phoneme distribution in American Sign Language (ASL) and Língua Brasileira de Sinais (Libras), tokens of the claw-5 handshape were extracted and analyzed for whether the handshape contributed to the overall meaning of the sign. The data suggests that distribution of the claw-5 handshape is not randomly distributed across the lexicon, but clusters around six formmeaning patterns: convex-concave, Unitary-elements, non-compact matter, hand-as-hand, touch, and interlocking. Interestingly, feature-level motivations were uncovered as the source of the mappings These findings are considered within a new cognitive framework to better understand how and why sub-morphemic units develop and maintain motivated form-meaning mappings. The model proposed here, Embodied Cognitive Phonology, builds on cognitive and usage-based approaches but incorporates theories of embodiment to address the source of the claw-5 mappings. Embodied Cognitive Phonology provides a unifying framework for understanding the perceived differences in phonological patterning and organization across the modalities. Both language-internal and languageexternal sources of motivation contribute to the emergence of form-meaning mappings. Arbitrariness is argued to be but one possible outcome from the process of emergence and schematization of phonological content, and exists alongside motivation as a legitimate state of linguistic units of all sizes of complexity. Importantly, because language is dynamic, these states are not fixed, but are in continuous flux, as language users reinvent and reinterpret form and meaning over time.

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Section: Setting the Stagementioning

confidence: 81%

Language comprehenders represent object distance both visually and auditorily

Winter

Bergen

2012

Lang Cognition

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“…This debate can now be resolved with a classic dialectic synthesis: they are both right, but for different regions of the vocabulary. The structure of the vocabulary serves both to promote language acquisition through sound symbolism [6][7][8] as well as to facilitate efficient communication in later language through arbitrariness maximizing the information present in the speech signal [9,13]. Figure 5.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are also numerous languagespecific properties, such as phonoaesthemes, that refer to clusters of phonemes relating to specific meanings. For example, in English, words associated with the nose and its functions tend to begin with sn-, or words referring to light often begin with gl- [6]. Preferences for certain sound-meaning relationships, have been demonstrated to affect learning of novel adjectives [15], verbs [16,17], nouns [18,19] and mixes thereof [20], though these studies generally test a forced choice between two alternatives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How arbitrary is language?

Monaghan

Shillcock

Christiansen

et al. 2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

221

278

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It is a long established convention that the relationship between sounds and meanings of words is essentially arbitrary—typically the sound of a word gives no hint of its meaning. However, there are numerous reported instances of systematic sound–meaning mappings in language, and this systematicity has been claimed to be important for early language development. In a large-scale corpus analysis of English, we show that sound–meaning mappings are more systematic than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, this systematicity is more pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and reduces in later vocabulary development. We propose that the vocabulary is structured to enable systematicity in early language learning to promote language acquisition, while also incorporating arbitrariness for later language in order to facilitate communicative expressivity and efficiency.

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“…28 for a review). For example, ''gl-'' in English tends to occur in words relating to sound and vision: glimmer, glitter, gleam, glow, glint, etc; and people are sensitive to these sound-meaning relations as evidenced by priming experiments (29). Although it is often assumed that the presence of sound symbolism would require that words with similar referents have the same phonological form across different languages (1, 3), we suggest that systematic relationships between sound and word use are more likely to be specific to individual languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonological typicality influences on-line sentence comprehension

Farmer

Christiansen

Monaghan

2006

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

158

221

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Since Saussure, the relationship between the sound and the meaning of words has been regarded as largely arbitrary. Here, however, we show that a probabilistic relationship exists between the sound of a word and its lexical category. Corpus analyses of nouns and verbs indicate that the phonological properties of the individual words in these two lexical categories form relatively separate and coherent clusters, with some nouns sounding more typical of the noun category than others and likewise for verbs. Additional analyses reveal that the phonological properties of nouns and verbs affect lexical access, and we also demonstrate the influence of such properties during the on-line processing of both simple unambiguous and syntactically ambiguous sentences. Thus, although the sound of a word may not provide cues to its specific meaning, phonological typicality, the degree to which the sound properties of an individual word are typical of other words in its lexical category, affects both word-and sentence-level language processing. The findings are consistent with a perspective on language comprehension in which sensitivity to multiple syntactic constraints in adulthood emerges as a product of language-development processes that are driven by the integration of multiple cues to linguistic structure, including phonological typicality.

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The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes

Cited by 269 publications

References 32 publications

Language comprehenders represent object distance both visually and auditorily

Language comprehenders represent object distance both visually and auditorily

How arbitrary is language?

Phonological typicality influences on-line sentence comprehension

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