TY  - JOUR
A1  - Conrad, Markus
A1  - Ullrich, Susann
A1  - Schmidtke, David S.
A1  - Kotz, Sonja A.
T1  - ERPs reveal an iconic relation between sublexical phonology and affective meaning
JF  - Cognition : international journal of cognitive science
N2  - Classical linguistic theory assumes that formal aspects, like sound, are not internally related to the meaning of words. However, recent research suggests language might code affective meaning such as threat and alert sublexically. Positing affective phonological iconicity as a systematic organization principle of the German lexicon, we calculated sublexical affective values for sub-syllabic phonological word segments from a large-scale affective lexical German database by averaging valence and arousal ratings of all words any phonological segment appears in. We tested word stimuli with either consistent or inconsistent mappings between lexical affective meaning and sublexical affective values (negative-valence/high-arousal vs. neutral-valence/lowarousal) in an EEG visual-lexical-decision task. A mismatch between sublexical and lexical affective values elicited an increased N400 response. These results reveal that systematic affective phonological iconicity - extracted from the lexicon - impacts the extraction of lexical word meaning during reading.
KW  - Sound symbolism
KW  - Visual word recognition
KW  - Phonological iconicity
KW  - Affective meaning
KW  - N400
KW  - ERPs
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105182
SN  - 0010-0277
SN  - 1873-7838
VL  - 226
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -