Psychology in Russia: State of Art (Mar 2019)

Possible Cognitive Mechanisms for Identifying Visually-presented Sound-Symbolic Words

  • Liubov O. Tkacheva,
  • Yulia G. Sedelkina,
  • Andrey D. Nasledov

DOI
https://doi.org/10.11621/pir.2019.0114
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 1
pp. 188 – 200

Abstract

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Background. Sound symbolism (SS) refers to the direct association between the sound and the meaning of a word. Te results of cross-linguistic research prove that SS is universal for diferent languages and cultures. Tirty percent of all natural languages consist of SS words. But despite the large number of psychosemantic studies which have been conducted, the cognitive mechanisms of the perception of SS words still remain unclear. Objective. Te aim of this study was to determine how Russian-speaking subjects perceive visually presented English and Russian words, as measured by the Lexical decision method. Design. Te study sample consisted of 148 subjects of ages ranging from 13 to 78. Te study was conducted in two stages. During the frst stage, the perception of visually-presented English SS words by Russian learners of English, with three diferent levels of language profciency, was studied. During the second stage, the perception of visually-presented Russian SS words by Russian native speakers from three diferent age groups was studied. Te stimuli material was selected according to the following criteria: 1) ach word was monosyllabic; 2) Each SS word corresponded to a single arbitrary (non-SS) word of the same pronunciation type; and 3) Each word corresponded to a non-word, formed from it by replacing letters according to the phonotactic rules of English and Russian. At each stage of the study, each subject was given 80 stimuli consisting of 20 SS words, 20 non-SS words, and 40 non-words. An analysis of contingency tables (Chi-square test), comparison of averages (Student’s t-test), and analyses of variances (ANOVA) were applied to the data. Results. Te visually-presented SS words were identifed more slowly and with more errors than the non-SS words, regardless of the language (Russian or English), the subjects’ age, and their English language profciency. Conclusions. Te observed delay efect in the cognitive processing of visually-presented SS words is due to the cognitive complexity of the task, which leads to the activation of cross-modal interaction system, besides, interfering systems of information processing are assumed to exist.

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