Iconicity in English and Spanish and Its Relation to Lexical Category and Age of Acquisition.
Iconicity in English and Spanish and Its Relation to Lexical Category and Age of Acquisition.
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0137147
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发表时间：
2015
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Lupyan G
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Perry LK;Perlman M;Lupyan G
符号语言在其词汇中表现出象似性（形式和意义之间的相似性），许多非印欧语口语都有相当大的一类被称为意符的标志性词汇。相比之下，印欧语言如英语和西班牙语被认为是任意的，除了少量的拟声词。在三个英语实验和两个西班牙语实验中，我们要求母语为英语和西班牙语的MacArthur-Bates交际发展量表中的600个单词的象似性。我们发现，两种语言词汇的象似性随词汇范畴的不同而存在着理论意义上的差异。在这两种语言中，形容词被评为比名词和功能词更像，对应于英语和西班牙语之间的动词语义的类型学差异，英语动词被评为相对像比西班牙语动词。我们还发现，两种语言的象似性等级和习得年龄呈负相关。较早学习的词汇往往更具有象似性，这表明早期词汇中的象似性可能有助于词汇学习。总之，这些研究结果表明，象似性是一个分级的质量，弥漫在词汇，即使是最“任意”的口语。这些发现提供了令人信服的证据，证明象似性是所有语言的重要属性，包括手语和口语，包括印欧语。
Signed languages exhibit iconicity (resemblance between form and meaning) across their vocabulary, and many non-Indo-European spoken languages feature sizable classes of iconic words known as ideophones. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English and Spanish are believed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments with English and two with Spanish, we asked native speakers to rate the iconicity of ~600 words from the English and Spanish MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories. We found that iconicity in the words of both languages varied in a theoretically meaningful way with lexical category. In both languages, adjectives were rated as more iconic than nouns and function words, and corresponding to typological differences between English and Spanish in verb semantics, English verbs were rated as relatively iconic compared to Spanish verbs. We also found that both languages exhibited a negative relationship between iconicity ratings and age of acquisition. Words learned earlier tended to be more iconic, suggesting that iconicity in early vocabulary may aid word learning. Altogether these findings show that iconicity is a graded quality that pervades vocabularies of even the most “arbitrary” spoken languages. The findings provide compelling evidence that iconicity is an important property of all languages, signed and spoken, including Indo-European languages.