ArticleBehavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)2018
Affective Congruence between Sound and Meaning of Words Facilitates Semantic Decision.
Article in Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland), 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Developing Associations to the Sounds of a Name.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Is a boat bigger than a ship? Null results in the investigation of vowel sound symbolism on size judgements in real language.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Article
- The Relationships Between Initial Consonants in Japanese Sound Symbolic Words and Familiarity, Multi-Sensory Imageability, Emotional Valence, and Arousal.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2021Article
- Visual and Affective Multimodal Models of Word Meaning in Language and Mind.Cognitive science · 2021Article
- Semantics Based on the Physical Characteristics of Facial Expressions Used to Produce Japanese Vowels.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Affective Arousal Links Sound to Meaning.Psychological science · 2020Article
- Affective iconic words benefit from additional sound-meaning integration in the left amygdala.Human brain mapping · 2019Article
- Preconceptual Spectral and Temporal Cues as a Source of Meaning in Speech and Music.Brain sciences · 2019Review
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2 authors.
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Abstract
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 feature 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.
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