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The role of valence and arousal for phonological iconicity in the lexicon of German: a cross-validation study using pseudoword ratings.
- Source :
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Cognition & Emotion . May2024, p1-22. 22p. 8 Illustrations, 4 Charts. - Publication Year :
- 2024
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Abstract
- The notion of sound symbolism receives increasing interest in psycholinguistics. Recent research – including empirical effects of affective phonological iconicity on language processing (Adelman et al., 2018; Conrad et al., 2022) – suggested language codes affective meaning at a basic phonological level using specific phonemes as sublexical markers of emotion. Here, in a series of 8 rating-experiments, we investigate the sensitivity of language users to assumed affectively-iconic systematic distribution patterns of phonemes across the German vocabulary:After computing sublexical-affective-values (SAV) concerning valence and arousal for the entire German phoneme inventory according to occurrences of syllabic onsets, nuclei and codas in a large-scale affective normative lexical database, we constructed pseudoword material differing in SAV to test for subjective affective impressions.Results support affective iconicity as affective ratings mirrored sound-to-meaning correspondences in the lexical database. Varying SAV of otherwise semantically meaningless pseudowords altered affective impressions: Higher arousal was consistently assigned to pseudowords made of syllabic constituents more often used in high-arousal words – contrasted by less straightforward effects of valence SAV. Further disentangling specific differential effects of the two highly-related affective dimensions valence and arousal, our data clearly suggest arousal, rather than valence, as the relevant dimension driving affective iconicity effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 02699931
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Cognition & Emotion
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 177388895
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2024.2353775