ERPs reveal an iconic relation between sublexical phonology and affective meaning
- 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 meaningClassical 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.…
| Author details: | Markus ConradORCiDGND, Susann Ullrich, David S. Schmidtke, Sonja A. KotzGND |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105182 |
| ISSN: | 0010-0277 |
| ISSN: | 1873-7838 |
| Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35689874 |
| Title of parent work (English): | Cognition : international journal of cognitive science |
| Publisher: | Elsevier |
| Place of publishing: | Amsterdam |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of first publication: | 2022/09/01 |
| Publication year: | 2022 |
| Release date: | 2024/05/30 |
| Tag: | Affective meaning; ERPs; N400; Phonological iconicity; Sound symbolism; Visual word recognition |
| Volume: | 226 |
| Article number: | 105182 |
| Number of pages: | 8 |
| Funding institution: | German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Cluster of Excellence "Languages; of Emotion" at the Freie Universitat Berlin |
| Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
| DDC classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie |
| 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik | |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
| Publishing method: | Open Access / Hybrid Open-Access |
| License (German): |  CC-BY-NC-ND - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell, keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International |
