Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning

Mutsumi Imai, Sotaro Kita, Miho Nagumo, Hiroyuki Okada
2008 Cognition  
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 soundsymbolic verbs whose sounds were judged to match certain actions better than others, as confirmed by adult Japanese-as well as English speakers, and
more » ... by 2-and 3-year-old Japanese-speaking children. These sound-symbolic verbs, together with other novel nonsound-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.
doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015 pmid:18835600 fatcat:hxmkxwmarfdw7pwtseyh3qkw5q