abstractIn contrast to arbitrariness, a recent perspective is that words contain both arbitrary and iconic aspects. We investigated iconicity in word recognition, and the possibility that iconic words have special links between phonological and semantic features that may facilitate their processing. In Experiment 1, participants completed a lexical decision task (“Is this letter string a word?”) including words varying in their iconicity. Notably, we manipulated stimulus presentation conditions such that the items were visually degraded for half of the participants; this manipulation has been shown to increase reliance on phonology. Responses to words higher in iconicity were faster and more accurate, but this did not interact with condition. In Experiment 2 we explicitly directed participants’ attention to phonology by using a phonological lexical decision task (“Does this letter string sound like a word?”). Responses to words that were higher in iconicity were once again faster. These results demonstrate facilitatory effects of iconicity in lexical processing, thus showing that the benefits of iconic mappings extend beyond those reported for language learning and those argued for language evolution.

中文翻译：

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象似性在词汇决策中的影响

摘要与任意性相反，最近的观点是单词包含任意和标志性方面。我们研究了单词识别中的象似性，以及标志性单词在语音和语义特征之间具有特殊联系的可能性，这可能有助于它们的处理。在实验 1 中，参与者完成了一项词汇决策任务（“这个字母串是一个词吗？”），其中包括在其相似性上有所不同的词。值得注意的是，我们操纵了刺激呈现条件，使得一半参与者的项目在视觉上退化；这种操纵已被证明会增加对音韵学的依赖。对象似性较高的词的反应更快、更准确，但这并没有与条件相互作用。声音像一个词？”）。对象似性较高的词的反应再次更快。这些结果证明了象似性在词汇处理中的促进作用，从而表明象形映射的好处超出了语言学习和语言进化所报道的那些。