Tuesday 26th, 11-12.30, B21 7 George Square

Motivated vs. conventional systematicity: Implications for language learning and the structure of the lexicon

Alan Nielsen

Given that the task of language learning involves pressures for both learnability and communicative accuracy, one might expect that, contra to the linguistic dogma of arbitrariness, systematic mappings between signals and meanings might be easier to learn. In the past decade two streams of research — one exploring systematic signal-meaning mappings that are conventional, and one exploring mappings that are sound-symbolic or otherwise motivated by the structure of the language learner/environment. In this talk I will present the results of an experiment where participants learned a language that used either motivated (vowel height/frontness–> size; consonant plosivity –> shape) or conventional associations between signals and meanings. The results of this experiment suggest that sound-symbolic associations are easier to learn than conventional associations, and that at least part of this benefit arises from an early advantage for motivated associations. However, the results also serve to demonstrate how little is known about what consonantal and vowel characteristics drive sound-symbolic associations.

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