Linguistic experience alters the processing of sound symbolism : An EEG Study

Sound symbolism refers to a non-arbitrary relationship between linguistic sounds and meanings. Sound symbolism has been discussed in relation to the ontogenesis of language. Our previous ERP study revealed that preverbal infants who are just about to start word learning show the N400 response to sound symbolically mismatched speech sound-visual shape pairs, suggesting that the infants detected semantic anomaly in this case. Most of lexical words are, however, not sound-symbolic, and sound-meaning correspondence does not necessarily provide reliable information for semantic processing. In this study, we tested adults using the same sound-symbolically matched/mismatched stimuli as in our previous infant study. Adults showed no N400 effect, but showed a response resembling the P600, which is said to reflect re-evaluation process of stimuli, to sound-symbolically incongruent pairs. The results suggest that linguistic experience alters the processing of sound symbolism; adults do not process sound symbolism in a regular semantic network.