Language article

[Lawler, John M]

My subscription to Language comes to my office in
Michigan, and I spend the summer in Washington, so
when I returned this week, what did I find in my
mailbox but Volume 80, Number 2 of Language?

... with an article (pp 290-311) with the following abstract 
(from http://www.lsadc.org/language/802.pdf)

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY OF PHONAESTHEMES

Benjamin K. Bergen

University of Hawai'i at Manoa

The psychological reality of English phonaesthemes is demonstrated
through a priming experiment with native speakers of American English.
Phonaesthemes are well-represented sound-meaning pairings, such as
English gl-, which occurs in numerous words with meanings relating to
light and vision. In the experiment, phonaesthemes, despite being
noncompositional in nature, displayed priming effects much like those
that have been reported for compositional morphemes.
These effects could not be explained as the result of semantic or
phonological priming, either alone or in combination. The results
support a view of the lexicon in which shared form and meaning across
words is a key factor in their relatedness, and in which morphological
composition is not required for internal word structure to play a role
in language processing.

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Highly recommended!

Cheers,
 
 -John Lawler  http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler  U Michigan Linguistics
Dept
 
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     "Since in human speech, different sounds have different meaning, to
      study the coordination of certain sounds with certain meanings is
to
      study language."  -- Leonard Bloomfield




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