台大心理系

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relation between speech sounds and meanings. Contrary to the view from traditional linguistics, we review evidence that sound symbolism is one of important design features of language, affects on-line processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, which claim that (1) pre verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, by biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi modal input; (2) sound symbolism helps infants to gain the referential insight for speech sounds; (3) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds and their reference and establish a lexical representation (4) Sound symbolism helps toddlers word learning by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem . For this purpose, we present evidence from a series of studies in my laboratory, including behavioral and EEG studies with infants and preschool age children, as well as fMRI study with adults. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to the origin of language, drawing the parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny of language.