Sound symbolism bootstraps infants into referential insight

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Relating speech sound to meaning is a critical step for infants to break into language. Using EEG phase synchronization and event-related brain potentials, we show that sound symbolism helps 11-month-olds establish this link. Sound-symbolically matched shape-sound pairs (e.g., a spiky shape followed by the sound 'kipi') elicited smooth long-distance phase synchronization, suggesting effortless binding. In contrast, sound-symbolically mismatched shape-sound pairs elicited effortful communication over the left hemisphere, and increased brain potential negativity 400 ms after word onset. This suggests that infants spontaneously map speech sounds and the referent by biologically endowed multi-modal integration ability, and this ability bootstraps infants into referential insights for speech sounds and grasp the symbolic nature of words.