Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning a language involves learning how to map specificforms onto their associated meanings. Such mappings canutilise arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness, yet, ourunderstanding of how these two systems operate at differentstages of vocabulary development is still not fully understood.The Sound-Symbolism Bootstrapping Hypothesis (SSBH)proposes that sound-symbolism is essential for word learningto commence, but empirical evidence of exactly how sound-symbolism influences language learning is still sparse. It maybe the case that sound-symbolism supports acquisition ofcategories of meaning, or that it enables acquisition ofindividualized word meanings. In two Experiments whereparticipants learned form-meaning mappings from eithersound-symbolic or arbitrary languages, we demonstrate thechanging roles of sound-symbolism and arbitrariness fordifferent vocabulary sizes, showing that sound-symbolismprovides an advantage for learning of broad categories, whichmay then transfer to support learning individual words,whereas an arbitrary language impedes acquisition ofcategories of sound to meaning.