The DOI matches its Crossref record; 57 of the 57 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
How arbitrary is language?
Open accessAbstract
It is a long established convention that the relationship between sounds and meanings of words is essentially arbitrary—typically the sound of a word gives no hint of its meaning. However, there are numerous reported instances of systematic sound–meaning mappings in language, and this systematicity has been claimed to be important for early language development. In a large-scale corpus analysis of English, we show that sound–meaning mappings are more systematic than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, this systematicity is more pronounced for words involved in the early stages of language acquisition and reduces in later vocabulary development. We propose that the vocabulary is structured to enable systematicity in early language learning to promote language acquisition, while also incorporating arbitrariness for later language in order to facilitate communicative expressivity and efficiency.
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Cited by
Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language
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Self-citationHow Efficiency Shapes Human Language
Gibson, E., Futrell, R., Piantadosi, S. P., Dautriche, I., Mahowald, K., Bergen, L., & Levy, R. (2019) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2019.02.003 · Cited by 485
The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution
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Iconicity in English and Spanish and Its Relation to Lexical Category and Age of Acquisition
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Metadata
- Authors
- Monaghan, P., Shillcock, R. C., Christiansen, M. H., & Kirby, S.
- Venue
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2014-09-19
- Volume
- 369
- Issue
- 1651
- Pages
- 20130299
- ISSN
- 0962-8436 (ISSN-L)
- 1471-2970
- OpenAlex
- W2098586765
- Cited by
- 317
- References
- 57
- FWCI
- 50.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- Licence
- royalsociety.org/journals/ethics-policies/data-sharing-mining/ (tdm)
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