ERPs reveal an iconic relation between sublexical phonology and affective meaning

M. Conrad*, S. Ullrich, D. Schmidtke, S. A. Kotz

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Classical linguistic theory assumes that formal aspects, like sound, are not internally related to the meaning of words. However, recent research suggests language might code affective meaning such as threat and alert sublexically. Positing affective phonological iconicity as a systematic organization principle of the German lexicon, we calculated sublexical affective values for sub-syllabic phonological word segments from a large-scale affective lexical German database by averaging valence and arousal ratings of all words any phonological segment appears in. We tested word stimuli with either consistent or inconsistent mappings between lexical affective meaning and sublexical affective values (negative-valence/high-arousal vs. neutral-valence/low-arousal) in an EEG visual-lexical-decision task. A mismatch between sublexical and lexical affective values elicited an increased N400 response. These results reveal that systematic affective phonological iconicity - extracted from the lexicon - impacts the extraction of lexical word meaning during reading.

Original languageEnglish
Article number105182
Number of pages8
JournalCognition
Volume226
Early online date8 Jun 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2022

Keywords

  • Affective meaning
  • COMPONENT
  • CORRESPONDENCES
  • EMOTION
  • ERPs
  • LANGUAGE
  • LEXICAL DECISION
  • N400
  • PHONEMES
  • Phonological iconicity
  • SHAPE
  • SOUND SYMBOLISM
  • Sound symbolism
  • VALENCE
  • Visual word recognition
  • WORD

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