Abstract
Some words are sound-symbolic in that they involve a non-arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning. Here, we report that 25-month-old children are sensitive to cross-linguistically valid sound-symbolic matches in the domain of action and that this sound symbolism facilitates verb learning in young children. We constructed a set of novel sound-symbolic verbs whose sounds were judged to match certain actions better than others, as confirmed by adult Japanese- as well as English speakers, and by 2- and 3-year-old Japanese-speaking children. These sound-symbolic verbs, together with other novel non-sound-symbolic verbs, were used in a verb learning task with 3-year-old Japanese children. In line with the previous literature, 3-year-olds could not generalize the meaning of novel non-sound-symbolic verbs on the basis of the sameness of action. However, 3-year-olds could correctly generalize the meaning of novel sound-symbolic verbs. These results suggest that iconic scaffolding by means of sound symbolism plays an important role in early verb learning.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 54-65 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Cognition |
| Volume | 109 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Oct 2008 |
Keywords
- Scaffolding for early verb learning
- Verb learning
- Sound symbolism
- Iconicity in language