Cross-Linguistic Sound to Meaning Mappings in Relational Terms: The Role of Acoustic Form in Judgments of Word Meaning Pubblico
McCormick, Kelly (2012)
Abstract
Abstract
Cross-Linguistic Sound to Meaning Mappings in Relational Terms: The
Role of Acoustic
Form in Judgments of Word Meaning
Language is a hallmark of the human mind, and pervades human
experience. Since
ancient Hindu and Greek philosophers, humans have pondered how it
is that words carry
meaning. A central question is whether words can have inherent
meaning (Plato's
'natural meaning'), or whether words assume meaning only by
language-specific
convention. The classic and predominant view of human language is
that the relationship
between sound and meaning is arbitrary (de Saussure, 1959; Hockett
1960; Pinker, 1994).
The sounds that comprise words bear no inherent relationship to the
things in the world
that they represent. Over the past century, however, research has
provided evidence for
non-arbitrary mappings in language (Sapir, 1929; Nuckolls, 1999).
To date, a majority of
empirical work has focused on sound to meaning correspondences for
concrete, sensory
domains of meaning. I examine whether similar mappings exist for
relational terms,
which take their meaning largely from context, and in relation to
one another. Acoustic
analyses of proximal and distal relational terms across multiple
languages were
conducted to determine whether characteristics of the sound
structure of these terms
reliably map to meaning. An experiment was then conducted to
determine whether
listeners could judge word meaning in foreign relational terms from
sound structure
alone.
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Table of Contents
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Table of Contents
Introduction
1
Cross-linguistic Acoustic Analysis
8
Materials
8
Procedure
10
Results and Discussion
11
Word Level Analysis
12
Vowel Level Analysis
12
Summary
15
Meaning Judgments
16
Method
16
Participants
16
Stimulus Materials
17
Procedure
17
Results and Discussion
18
Correlations Between Acoustic Properties and Judgments of
Meaning
19
Word Level Measures
19
Vowel Level Measures
20
Summary
20
General Discussion
21
Conclusion
26
References
28
Footnotes
32
Tables
33
Figure Captions
35
About this Master's Thesis
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