Affective Congruence between Sound and Meaning of Words Facilitates Semantic Decision

Arash Aryani, Arthur Jacobs
2018 Behavioral Sciences  
A similarity between the form and meaning of a word (i.e., iconicity) may help language users to more readily access its meaning through direct form-meaning mapping. Previous work has supported this view by providing empirical evidence for this facilitatory effect in sign language, as well as for onomatopoetic words (e.g., cuckoo) and ideophones (e.g., zigzag). Thus, it remains largely unknown whether the beneficial role of iconicity in making semantic decisions can be considered a general
more » ... re in spoken language applying also to "ordinary" words in the lexicon. By capitalizing on the affective domain, and in particular arousal, we organized words in two distinctive groups of iconic vs. non-iconic based on the congruence vs. incongruence of their lexical (meaning) and sublexical (sound) arousal. In a two-alternative forced choice task, we asked participants to evaluate the arousal of printed words that were lexically either high or low arousing. In line with our hypothesis, iconic words were evaluated more quickly and more accurately than their non-iconic counterparts. These results indicate a processing advantage for iconic words, suggesting that language users are sensitive to sound-meaning mappings even when words are presented visually and read silently. Author Contributions: Conceptualization, A.A. and A.M.J.; Methodology, A.A.; Software, A.A.; Validation, A.A., A.M.J.; Formal Analysis, A.A.; Investigation, A.A. and A.M.J.; Resources, A.M.J.; Data Curation, A.A.; Writing-Original Draft Preparation, A.A.; Writing-Review & Editing, A.A. and A.M.J.; Visualization, A.A.; Supervision, A.M.J.; Project Administration, A.A. Funding: This research received no external funding.
doi:10.3390/bs8060056 pmid:29857513 pmcid:PMC6028912 fatcat:jzdhkjhptrfalfwahnjb2m3br4