Meaningless words promote meaningful categorization
Meaningless words promote meaningful categorization
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DOI：
10.1017/langcog.2014.21
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发表时间：
2015-06-01
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Casasanto, Daniel
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lupyan, Gary;Casasanto, Daniel
在传统的说法中，单词的含义是大脑词汇库中的条目。无意义的词没有这样的条目，因此是没有意义的。在这里，我们表明在某些情况下，无意义词的功能与常规词没有区别。“毫无意义”的单词“foove”和“crelch”让参与者系统地选择不同的形容词组合，并可靠地与不同种类的外星生物相匹配（例如，“crelches”是尖而窄的，“fooves”是大而胖的）。在一项分类任务中，参与者主要根据圆/尖对两种外星人进行分类，这些新标签与传统词汇（如圆，尖）一样有助于表现。这一研究结果拓展了声音象征主义的研究范围，并支持了一种非传统的词义观，即通过约定俗成的形式-意义配对，词语没有意义。相反，单词的“意义”是单词形式对使用者心理活动的影响。
On traditional accounts, word meanings are entries in a mental lexicon. Nonsense words lack such entries, and are therefore meaningless. Here, we show that under some circumstances nonsense words function indistinguishably from conventional words. The 'nonsense' words foove and crelch led participants to select systematically different clusters of adjectives and were reliably matched to different species of alien creatures (e.g., 'crelches' were pointy and narrow and 'fooves' were large and fat). In a categorization task in which participants learned to group two species of aliens primarily on the basis of roundness/pointiness, these novel labels facilitated performance as much as conventional words (e.g., round, pointy). The results expand the scope of research on sound symbolism and support a non-traditional view of word meaning according to which words do not have meanings by virtue of a conventionalized form-meaning pairing. Rather, the 'meaning' of a word is the effect that the word form has on the user's mental activity.