Sound symbolism facilitates early
verb learning
1. Research
demonstrated the speakers of two very different languages (English and
Japanese) both recognized the same sound
symbolism in the domain of actions. (= sensitive to the
sound symbolic)
- The sound symbolism was detectable by adult native speaker of Japanese and adult native speaker of British English who had no knowledge of Japanese.
- The same sound symbolism was detected by Japanese
children as young as 25 months of age who could not have been exposed to the
novel mimetics used in the study.
- It is first research to empirically establish
that there is link between linguistic sound and action.
- Mimetics seem to contain aspects of sound symbolism
that are biologically grounded and are recognized by speakers of across
different languages.
- Yet, mimetics are one of the hardest
types of words of adult second language learners
:
may require massive exposure to mimetics used in real contexts
: it
is crucial to have intensive exposure to a specific language in early stages of development
2.
Sound symbolism plays a facilitative role in
learning of action names in 3-year old children.
- When novel verbs sound-symbolically matched the
action, then 3-year old children were able to make generalization.
- It was the sound-symbolic properties of the mimetic
words which facilitated verb generalization, not children’s morphological or
syntactic properties.
- The sound symbolism of the mimetic verb may help
children isolate the action out of the various components of an event.
- Sensitivity to sound-meaning matching increases with
learning, and some aspects of sound symbolism are more likely to be
language-specific.
- When children do detect sound symbolism in learning a
novel word, they take advantage of it, and this additional cue is especially
helpful for the learning of action names.
