2019년 1월 6일 일요일

The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution - Mutsumi Imai & Sotaro Kita

<Sound Symbolism Bootstrapping Hypothesis>

  • Sound symbolism provides a scaffolding mechanism for children in various stages of language development.
  • Sound symbolism helps children learn the meaning of words at different stages of early lexical development.

1. Children, even pre-verbal infants, are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input.

  • Canadian toddlers: kay-kee & boo-baa
  • Japanese 25-month-olds: novel sound symbolic words - walking in a specific manner
  • Japanese 3-years-olds: generating novel sound symbolic words
    • English-speaking adults with no knowledge of Japanese were able to guess which novel mimetics were used for which type of event (rolling or jumping) at above chance levels of accuracy.
  • Spanish-reared 3-month-olds: sound symbolism of vowels and size
  • American 4-month-olds: kiki & bubu


2. Young children are sensitive to a wider range of possible sound symbolic correspondences than adults, but this sensitivity gets pruned and reorganized as they learn more words in their native language.
  • Some sound symbolic words in a given language are opaque to adult speakers of other language.
  • (Iwasaki et al) Adult English speakers' judgements of conventional Japanese mimetic words for laughing and walking tended to converge with those of Japanese speakers on semantic dimensions concerning the magnitude(of size and sound), while they were quite different on evaluative dimensions (e.g. beauty and pleasantness).
  • (Saji et al) Japanese and English speakers were presented various locomotion videos and asked to generate a word that would sound-symbolically match each action, then rate that action on 5 semantic dimensions (size, speed, weight, energeticity and jerkiness). Results showed that certain sound-meaning links were common across the two languages.
  • Sound symbolic sensitivity in English- and Greek-speaking adults and 3-year-olds
    • (pretest) rating the degree of sound symbolic match between novel words and various manners of walking
    • (test) based on the ratings, 3 types of items were selected: universal items, English-specific items, distractor items
    • Greek-speaking children could correctly choose the target video in both universal and English-specific conditions, suggesting that Greek-speaking children were sensitive to a wider range of sound symbolic correspondences than Greek-speaking adults.
  • EEG & ERP study
    • The results from ERP and phase synchronization analyses suggest that 11-month-olds could clearly detect Koher's shape sound symbolism and that sound symbolic associations fosters multi-sensory integration and semantic processing.

3. Sound symbolism helps infants who have just started word learning to gain the insight that speech sounds refer to entities in the world (i.e. the referential insight for speech sounds).
  • Establishing word-referent associations
    • Sound symbolism facilitates word learning in 14-month-old Japanese-speaking infants.
    • 'moma' for a round shape and 'kipi' for a spiky shape
  • Helping children find the invariance for generalization
    • Regardless of the language infants were acquiring, sound symbolism helped the children to find the relevant invariance in the scene for the verbs.
    • Young children are sensitive to a broader range of sound symbolism, including sound symbolism that adults speaking the same language might not detect.

4. Sound symbolism helps infants associate speech sounds and their referents and establish a lexical representation.
  • (Fernald & Morikawa) Japanese mothers used sound symbolic words such as onomatopoeia/mimetics frequently when talking to Japanese infants.
  • (Saji & Imai) The mother used mimetics more often for younger listeners, and least often to the adult experimenter.
  • Parents often point to the object, and children tend to learn the name better when the referent object was pointed at in the past.
  • Caretakers also use different types of sound symbolic words, depending on the child's stage of language development.

5. Sound symbolism helps toddlers identify referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem.
  • We agree that sound symbolism does not always help or sometimes even impedes word learning. Learning the meaning of a new word may be impeded if another similar sounding word with similar meaning is activated in children's minds.
  • The facilitative role of sound symbolism for individual word learning may differ across different classes of words and across different developmental stages.


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