{"pk":27951,"title":"Changing Signs: Testing How Sound-Symbolism Supports Early Word learning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Learning a language involves learning how to map specificforms onto their associated meanings. Such mappings canutilise arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness, yet, ourunderstanding of how these two systems operate at differentstages of vocabulary development is still not fully understood.The Sound-Symbolism Bootstrapping Hypothesis (SSBH)proposes that sound-symbolism is essential for word learningto commence, but empirical evidence of exactly how sound-symbolism influences language learning is still sparse. It maybe the case that sound-symbolism supports acquisition ofcategories of meaning, or that it enables acquisition ofindividualized word meanings. In two Experiments whereparticipants learned form-meaning mappings from eithersound-symbolic or arbitrary languages, we demonstrate thechanging roles of sound-symbolism and arbitrariness fordifferent vocabulary sizes, showing that sound-symbolismprovides an advantage for learning of broad categories, whichmay then transfer to support learning individual words,whereas an arbitrary language impedes acquisition ofcategories of sound to meaning.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Sound-symbolism"},{"word":"Language Learning"},{"word":"Vocabulary development"},{"word":"word learning"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8g86h8q3","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"James","middle_name":"","last_name":"Brand","name_suffix":"","institution":"Lancaster University","department":""},{"first_name":"Padraic","middle_name":"","last_name":"Monaghan","name_suffix":"","institution":"Lancaster, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics","department":""},{"first_name":"Peter","middle_name":"","last_name":"Walker","name_suffix":"","institution":"Lancaster, Sunway University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27951/galley/17589/download/"}]}