Systematic mappings of sound to meaning: A theoretical review.

The form of a word sometimes conveys semantic information. For example, the iconic word gurgle sounds like what it means, and busy is easy to identify as an English adjective because it ends in -y. Such links between form and meaning matter because they help people learn and use language. But gurgle also sounds like gargle and burble, and the -y in busy is morphologically and etymologically unrelated to the -y in crazy and watery. Whatever processing effects gurgle and busy have in common likely stem not from iconic, morphological, or etymological relationships but from systematicity more broadly: the phenomenon whereby semantically related words share a phonological or orthographic feature. In this review, we evaluate corpus evidence that spoken languages are systematic (even when controlling for iconicity, morphology, and etymology) and experimental evidence that systematicity impacts word processing (even in lieu of iconic, morphological, and etymological relationships). We conclude by drawing attention to the relationship between systematicity and low-frequency words and, consequently, the role that systematicity plays in natural language processing.

Similar-sounding words flesh out fuzzy meanings.

Most words are low in frequency, yet a prevailing theory of word meaning (the distributional hypothesis: that words with similar meanings occur in similar contexts) and corresponding computational models struggle to represent low-frequency words. We conducted two preregistered experiments to test the hypothesis that similar-sounding words flesh out deficient semantic representations. In Experiment 1, native English speakers made semantic relatedness decisions about a cue (e.g., dodge) followed either by a target that overlaps in form and meaning with a higher frequency word (evade, which overlaps with avoid) or by a control (elude), matched on distributional and formal similarity to the cue. (Participants did not see higher frequency words like avoid.) As predicted, participants decided faster and more often that overlapping targets, compared to controls, were semantically related to cues. In Experiment 2, participants read sentences containing the same cues and targets (e.g., The kids dodged something and She tried to evade/elude the officer). We used MouseView.js to blur the sentences and create a fovea-like aperture directed by the participant's cursor, allowing us to approximate fixation duration. While we did not observe the predicted difference at the target region (e.g., evade/elude), we found a lag effect, with shorter fixations on words following overlapping targets, suggesting easier integration of those meanings. These experiments provide evidence that words with overlapping forms and meanings bolster representations of low-frequency words, which supports approaches to natural language processing that incorporate both formal and distributional information and which revises assumptions about how an optimal language will evolve. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

New neighbours make bad fences: Form-based semantic shifts in word learning.

The meanings of words sometimes shift towards those of similar-sounding words. For example, expunge is etymologically related to puncture but now connotes "wiping away," and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this shift "is probably influenced by phonetic association with sponge." However, evidence for such form-based semantic shifts is anecdotal. We therefore conducted two experiments where participants learned novel words in sentence contexts (e.g., The boss embraiched the team's proposal, so they had to start over) and applied the inferred meanings to ambiguous sentences by providing ratings on a 7-point scale (e.g., Carol embraiched Gerald. How pleased was Gerald?). The inferred meanings of novel words that are spelt like existing words (e.g., embraich, like embrace) shifted towards the meanings of those existing words, relative to control novel words learned in identical contexts (e.g., fline; participants rated Gerald as more pleased to be embraiched than to be flined). These experiments provide the first evidence that newly learned words can indeed undergo form-based semantic shifts. We propose that shifts like these occur during word learning, when words activate rather than inhibit similar-sounding words, and we discuss why they seem to be more common in low-frequency words.