Non-Arbitrariness in Mapping Word Form to Meaning: Cross-Linguistic Formal Markers of Word Concreteness

Non-arbitrary mappings between size and sound of English words: Form typicality effects during lexical access and memory

A century of research has provided evidence of limited size sound symbolism in English, that is, certain vowels are non-arbitrarily associated with words denoting small versus large referents (e.g., /i/ as in teensy and /ɑ/ as in tall). In the present study, we investigated more extensive statistical regularities between surface form properties of English words and ratings of their semantic size, that is, form typicality, and its impact on language and memory processing. Our findings provide the first evidence of significant word form typicality for semantic size. In five empirical studies using behavioural megastudy data sets of performance on written and auditory lexical decision, reading aloud, semantic decision, and recognition memory tasks, we show that form typicality for size is a stronger and more consistent predictor of lexical access during word comprehension and production than semantic size, in addition to playing a significant role in verbal memory. The empirical results demonstrate that statistical information about non-arbitrary form-size mappings is accessed automatically during language and verbal memory processing, unlike semantic size that is largely dependent on task contexts that explicitly require participants to access size knowledge. We discuss how a priori knowledge about non-arbitrary form-meaning associations in the lexicon might be incorporated in models of language processing that implement Bayesian statistical inference.

Systematic mappings of sound to meaning: A theoretical review

The form of a word sometimes conveys semantic information. For example, the iconic word gurgle sounds like what it means, and busy is easy to identify as an English adjective because it ends in -y. Such links between form and meaning matter because they help people learn and use language. But gurgle also sounds like gargle and burble, and the -y in busy is morphologically and etymologically unrelated to the -y in crazy and watery. Whatever processing effects gurgle and busy have in common likely stem not from iconic, morphological, or etymological relationships but from systematicity more broadly: the phenomenon whereby semantically related words share a phonological or orthographic feature. In this review, we evaluate corpus evidence that spoken languages are systematic (even when controlling for iconicity, morphology, and etymology) and experimental evidence that systematicity impacts word processing (even in lieu of iconic, morphological, and etymological relationships). We conclude by drawing attention to the relationship between systematicity and low-frequency words and, consequently, the role that systematicity plays in natural language processing.

Quantifying social semantics: An inclusive definition of socialness and ratings for 8388 English words

It has been proposed that social experience plays an important role in the grounding of concepts, and socialness has been proffered as a fundamental organisational principle underpinning semantic representation in the human brain. However, the empirical support for these hypotheses is limited by inconsistencies in the way socialness has been defined and measured. To further advance theory, the field must establish a clearer working definition, and research efforts could be facilitated by the availability of an extensive set of socialness ratings for individual concepts. Therefore, in the current work, we employed a novel and inclusive definition to test the extent to which socialness is reliably perceived as a broad construct, and we report socialness norms for over 8000 English words, including nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Our inclusive socialness measure shows good reliability and validity, and our analyses suggest that the socialness ratings capture aspects of word meaning which are distinct to those measured by other pertinent semantic constructs, including concreteness and emotional valence. Finally, in a series of regression analyses, we show for the first time that the socialness of a word's meaning explains unique variance in participant performance on lexical tasks. Our dataset of socialness norms has considerable item overlap with those used in both other lexical/semantic norms and in available behavioural mega-studies. They can help target testable predictions about brain and behaviour derived from multiple representation theories and neurobiological accounts of social semantics.

Perceptual richness of words and its role in free and cued recall

This research aimed to clarify the role of the perceptual richness of words (PR) in the recall tasks. PR was operationalized as the number of sensory modalities through which an object can be perceived. Previously, we found that concepts experienced with many modalities (dog) were recalled more accurately in cued recall than those perceived with few modalities (rainbow) and abstract words. This finding fitted the Perceptual symbol system theory (PSST) and the Dual coding theory (DCT) predictions. We tested the PR effect in both cued (experiment 1- E1) and free recall tasks (experiment 2 – E2) in the present study. With careful stimuli manipulation of context availability and emotional valence and statistical control of arousal and relatedness, made to exclude their influence on recall, we tested alternative explanations of the concreteness effect offered by the relational-distinctiveness hypothesis. The additional perceptual codes improved recall accuracy in the cued recall task (E1), which was in line with the PSST and the DCT. This conclusion is straightforward: two critical groups of concrete words were matched for concreteness and visual perceptual strength. Thus, more accurate recall of concepts experienced with many modalities can be attributed to richer perceptual experience. However, the relational information was essential for recall accuracy in the free recall task (E2), as hypothesized by the relational-distinctiveness hypothesis.

A Cross‐Modal and Cross‐lingual Study of Iconicity in Language: Insights From Deep Learning

The present paper addresses the study of non‐arbitrariness in language within a deep learning framework. We present a set of experiments aimed at assessing the pervasiveness of different forms of non‐arbitrary phonological patterns across a set of typologically distant languages. Different sequence‐processing neural networks are trained in a set of languages to associate the phonetic vectorization of a set of words to their sensory (Experiment 1), semantic (Experiment 2), and word‐class representations (Experiment 3). The models are then tested, without further training, in a set of novel instances in a language belonging to a different language family, and their performance is compared with a randomized baseline. We show that the three cross‐domain mappings can be successfully transferred across languages and language families, suggesting that the phonological structure of the lexicon is pervaded with language‐invariant cues about the words' meaning and their syntactic classes.

Communicating abstract meaning: concepts revealed in words and gestures

words refer to concepts that cannot be directly experienced through our senses (e.g. truth, morality). How we ground the meanings of abstract words is one of the deepest problems in cognitive science today. We investigated this question in an experiment in which 62 participants were asked to communicate the meanings of words (20 abstract nouns, e.g. impulse; 10 concrete nouns, e.g. insect) to a partner without using the words themselves (the taboo task). We analysed the speech and associated gestures that participants used to communicate the meaning of each word in the taboo task. Analysis of verbal and gestural data yielded a number of insights. When communicating about the meanings of abstract words, participants' speech referenced more people and introspections. In contrast, the meanings of concrete words were communicated by referencing more objects and entities. Gesture results showed that when participants spoke about abstract word meanings their speech was accompanied by more metaphorical and beat gestures, and speech about concrete word meanings was accompanied by more iconic gestures. Taken together, the results suggest that abstract meanings are best captured by a model that allows dynamic access to multiple representation systems.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we review studies that deploy formal tools from probability and information theory to understand how and why language works the way that it does, focusing on phenomena ranging from the lexicon through syntax. These studies show how a pervasive pressure for efficiency guides the forms of natural language and indicate that a rich future for language research lies in connecting linguistics to cognitive psychology and mathematical theories of communication and inference.

Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages

It is widely assumed that one of the fundamental properties of spoken language is the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning. Some exceptions in the form of nonarbitrary associations have been documented in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, but these studies only involved small subsets of the 6,000+ languages spoken in the world today. By analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world's languages, we demonstrate that a considerable proportion of 100 basic vocabulary items carry strong associations with specific kinds of human speech sounds, occurring persistently across continents and linguistic lineages (linguistic families or isolates). Prominently among these relations, we find property words ("small" and i, "full" and p or b) and body part terms ("tongue" and l, "nose" and n). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species' unique communication system.

Imaging Imageability: Behavioral Effects and Neural Correlates of Its Interaction with Affect and Context

The construct of imageability refers to the extent to which a word evokes a tangible sensation. Previous research (Westbury et al., 2013) suggests that the behavioral effects attributed to a word's imageability can be largely or wholly explained by two objective constructs, contextual density and estimated affect. Here, we extend these previous findings in two ways. First, we show that closely matched stimuli on the three measures of contextual density, estimated affect, and human-judged imageability show a three-way interaction in explaining variance in LD RTs, but that imagebility accounts for no additional variance after contextual density and estimated affect are entered first. Secondly, we demonstrate that the loci and functional connectivity (via graphical models) of the brain regions implicated in processing the three variables during that task are largely over-lapping and similar. These two lines of evidence support the conclusion that the effect usually attributed to human-judged imageability is largely or entirely due to the effects of other correlated measures that are directly computable.