[EDLING:1733] Connection Between Sound and Meaning in Words Found

[Francis M. Hult]

Newswise

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/522242/

For more than 100 years the standard view among traditional language theorists 
was that, with the exception of onomatopoeia like "fizz" and "beep," the sound 
of a word tells us nothing about how it is used. This seemingly arbitrary 
relationship between words and their meaning in human language is hailed as 
singular to our species.

A new Cornell study takes that view to task.

"What we have shown is that the sound of a word can tell us something about 
how it is used," said Morten Christiansen, associate professor of psychology 
at Cornell. "Specifically, it tells us whether the word is used as a noun or 
as a verb, and this relationship affects how we process such words."

Christiansen, along with Thomas Farmer, a Cornell psychology graduate student, 
are co-authors of a paper about how the sounds of words contain information 
about their syntactic role. Their work will be published in the Aug. 8 print 
issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

To determine if the sound (phonology) of a word can indicate whether it is a 
noun or a verb, the researchers assessed the sounds of more than 3,000 nouns 
and verbs and analyzed their "relatedness" to one another.

"Nouns that are typical of other nouns in terms of what they sound like are 
processed faster, and similarly for verbs that have sounds typical of verbs," 
said Christiansen. "We show that such phonological typicality [sound 
relatedness] affects both the speed with which we access words in isolation as 
well as when we process them in the context of other words in a sentence."

In one experiment, the researchers asked Cornell undergraduate volunteers to 
read sentences with noun-verb homonyms -- word-forms that can be used both as 
a noun and as a verb. For example, "hunts" can be used as a plural noun ("the 
bear hunts were terrible") or as a verb ("the bear hunts for food"). In two 
other experiments, words that normally only occur either as a noun or as a 
verb were used. For example, "marble" and "insect" are almost always used as 
nouns, while "await" and "bury" are almost always used as verbs.

In all experiments, subjects read sentences on a computer screen, one word at 
a time, and the time spent reading each word was recorded. The researchers 
found that adults use the relationship between how words sound and how they 
are used to guide their comprehension of sentences.

"Because of the usefulness of this relationship for language acquisition, we 
suggest that it becomes an intricate part of the developing language system," 
he said, adding that these findings also suggest that "phonological typicality 
may be universal to all languages." Next, Christiansen plans to study how 
brain processing is affected by phonological typicality using neuro-imaging 
methods.

Padraic Monaghan, a lecturer in psychology at the University of York, United 
Kingdom, also contributed to the study.