abstractThe sound of words has been shown to relate to the meaning that the words denote, an effect that extends beyond morphological properties of the word. Studies of these sound-symbolic relations have described this iconicity in terms of individual phonemes, or alternatively due to acoustic properties (expressed in phonological features) relating to meaning. In this study, we investigated whether individual phonemes or phoneme features best accounted for iconicity effects. We tested 92 participants’ judgements about the appropriateness of 320 nonwords presented in written form, relating to 8 different semantic attributes. For all 8 attributes, individual phonemes fitted participants’ responses better than general phoneme features. These results challenge claims that sound-symbolic effects for visually presented words can access broad, cross-modal associations between sound and meaning, instead the results indicate the operation of individual phoneme to meaning relations. Whether similar effects are found for nonwords presented auditorially remains an open question.

中文翻译：

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书面文字的声音象征效果与单个音素或音素特征有关吗？

摘要单词的声音已被证明与单词所表示的含义有关，这种影响超出了单词的形态属性。对这些声音-符号关系的研究已经根据单个音素描述了这种相似性，或者由于与意义相关的声学特性（以语音特征表示）。在这项研究中，我们调查了单个音素或音素特征是否最能解释象似性效应。我们测试了 92 名参与者对 320 个以书面形式呈现的非单词的恰当性的判断，这些非单词涉及 8 个不同的语义属性。对于所有 8 个属性，单个音素比一般音素特征更适合参与者的反应。这些结果挑战了视觉呈现单词的声音符号效果可以访问广泛的说法，声音和意义之间的跨模态关联，而不是结果表明单个音素对意义关系的操作。对于以听觉方式呈现的非单词是否发现类似的效果仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。