Not just form, not just meaning: Words with consistent form-meaning mappings are learned earlier.

ABSTRACT: By leveraging Phonology-to-Semantics Consistency (PSC), which quantifies form-meaning systematicity as the semantic similarity between a target word and its phonological nearest neighbours, we document a unique effect of systematicity on Age of Acquisition (AoA). This effect is also found after controlling for the effect of neighbourhood density measured for word forms and lexical semantics and several other standard predictors of AoA. Moreover, we show that the effect of systematicity is not reducible to iconicity. Finally, we extensively probe the reliability of this finding by testing different statistical models, analysing systematicity in phonology and orthography and implementing random baselines, reporting a robust, unique negative effect of systematicity on AoA, such that more syst

SUBMITTER: Cassani G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9245153 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature