The Systematicity of the Sign: Modeling Activation of Semantic Attributes from Nonwords

The Systematicity of the Sign: Modeling Activation of Semantic Attributes from Nonwords Padraic Monaghan Centre for Research in Human Development and Learning, Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, UK Gary Lupyan Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Morten H. Christiansen Department of Psychology, Cornell University, USA Abstract between words constitute meaning, independent of those phonemes – is sustained. Yet, there are very many apparent exceptions to the rule of arbitrariness observed in spoken language. Morphology carries information about form-meaning mappings at a grammatical category level – even in languages with such impoverished systems of morphology as English, there are indicators in the spoken word about the general syntactic role of a word, in turn supporting inferences about semantic properties (Seidenberg & Gonnerman, 2000: Monaghan, Chater & Christiansen, 2005). Furthermore, there are many instances of sound-meaning relationships (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala, 1994), such as phonoaesthemes (certain phonological clusters relating to meaning, e.g., for English, spr- relates to fast movement, or –ump relates to roundedness). Such phonoaesthemes have been shown to be significantly expressed in corpora of English (Otis & Sagi, 2008), and have processing consequences in word reading (Bergen, 2004). Given these mixed messages available from the literature, it is unclear precisely how arbitrary language is. In a recent corpus analysis, Monaghan Shillcock, Christiansen & Kirby (2014) provided a first comprehensive assessment of the extent to which form and meaning is systematic or arbitrary in the vocabulary of English. They correlated the similarities between words in terms of their phonological form and determined the extent to which those phonological distances could predict distances in meaning space, where meaning was derived from two alternative representations. The first semantic representation was constructed on the basis of contextual co-occurrence vectors, similar to Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer, Foltz, & Laham, 1998). The second was based on semantic features derived from WordNet (Miller, 1990). Both types of semantic representation resulted in significant but very small amounts of systematicity between form and meaning, even when morphology and etymology was controlled. The actual systematicity between form and meaning is very small indeed, and, though intellectually intriguing, the small amounts of variance accounted for in the semantics by the phonology may be practically unimportant. However, studies of semantic attributes There are numerous studies demonstrating that people’s judgments about meanings of words can sometimes derive from their sound – a phenomenon often referred to as sound symbolism. A recent comprehensive assessment of English demonstrates that some small amount of systematicity exists between form and meaning. Is this small level of systematicity in language sufficient to drive the observed behavioral effects of sound symbolism? In this study we first tested the extent to which similarities amongst the sounds of words was sufficient to drive sound symbolic effects. We then tested whether a computational model that learned to map between form and meaning of English words better accounted for the observed behavior. We found that phonological similarity alone was sufficient to account for several effects of sound symbolism (without reference to meaning at all), but that the form-meaning mapping model was able to reproduce additional key behavioral effects of sound symbolism. Keywords: form-meaning mappings, arbitrariness of the sign, brand names, word learning. Introduction The sound of a word bears an arbitrary relationship to its meaning, such that the phonological properties of the word generally carry no information about its intended meaning (de Saussure, 1916; Hockett, 1960). Arbitrariness in language provides a host of potential advantages for communication: It permits the speaker and listener to extract themselves from the immediate situation, allowing language to express concepts distant in space and time, as well as hierarchical, abstract relationships (Clark, 1998); arbitrariness promotes learnability, in that acquisition of a new form-meaning relationship is not constrained by previous learning (Gasser, Sethuraman, & Hockema, 2010) and also ensures that the amount of information present in the environment for learning, and communicating the mapping is maximized (Monaghan, Christiansen, & Fitneva, 2011); arbitrariness enables direct mapping from word to concept, which iconic symbols do not (Lupyan & Thompson-Schill, 2012); finally, arbitrariness ensures that duality of patterning – where the relationships between phonemes constitute a word, and then the relationships