Sound Symbolism in Word Learning

Although numerous examples of sound symbolism exist in spoken language, little is known about whether listeners recognize and utilize these non-arbitrary relationships between sound and meaning to guide their interpretation of novel words. The present experiments examined the extent to which listeners are able to constrain meaning solely on the basis of the segmental sound structure of language. Native English-speaking monolinguals learned meanings for Japanese words in a vocabulary-learning task. Spoken Japanese words were paired with English meanings that either matched the actual meaning of the Japanese word (e.g., “ue” up), were antonyms (e.g., “ue” down), or were randomly paired (e.g., “ue” slow). The results revealed a processing benefit in learning matching word-meaning pairs over mismatching pairs, as evidenced by greater accuracy and faster reaction times. These findings suggest that adult word learners are sensitive to non-arbitrary relationships between the sound structure of spoken language and word meaning.