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Systematic Form–Meaning Mappings in Novel Word Learning: A Behavioral and Electrophysiological Study
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Julie Franco1, Marina Laganaro1, Valentina Borghesani1; 1NCCR evolving language, University of Geneva
The principle of arbitrariness between the signifier and the signified, central to Saussure’s theory, has long shaped modern linguistics (de Saussure, 1916). However, recent work in cognitive science has revealed systematic patterns of non arbitrariness in language, such as systematicity—the statistical association between the phonological structure of groups of words and their usage (Monaghan et al., 2007). Yet this phenomenon may not arise solely from arbitrariness; it may also be influenced by the phonological and/or semantic properties of existing lexical concepts. To investigate this issue, the present study examined lexical creativity and the ways in which adults generate new lexical items or draw on entries already present in their mental lexicon to label novel concepts. Specifically, we sought to determine whether the phonological naming of unknown concepts is shaped by their degree of semantic overlap with newly learned items, as well as to identify the electrophysiological correlates of such semantic extensions. After learning seven novel words associated with characters differing along four semantic features, participants were asked—during EEG recording—to produce newly learned words as well as new labels for seven additional characters that were semantically related to the learned ones. Findings suggest a significant effect of semantic overlap: novel items sharing more semantic features with the learned targets were produced with greater phonological similarity to those targets. However, this form-meaning generalization was modulated by individual learning rates, suggesting that the ability to exploit semantic-phonological systematicity depends on the robustness of the initial acquisition. On the electrophysiological side, participant recruitment is still underway. We will conduct amplitude and microstate analyses to compare the electrophysiological responses associated with newly learned words and the semantic extensions applied to the new characters. Finally, we aim to investigate how the number of shared semantic features shapes these electrophysiological outcomes.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics,