Sound Matters

Language sounds, i.e., phonemes, are believed not to bear any meaning themselves, only at the word level, meaning is created. However, numerous studies over the past 100 years have revealed iconic relationships, i.e., a certain fit, between language sounds and word meanings, with regard to several semantic dimensions, such as size, shape, brightness, or distance. This suggests iconicity as a functional mechanism in language. To examine the underlying cognitive processes, a holistic operationalization of iconicity in a language, here German, is needed. The semantic differential shows that many different dimensions of meaning can be mapped onto a few connotative core dimensions such as valence and arousal, which are also the essential components of dimensional theories of affect. Investigations of a German affective word database reveal that some language sounds appear particularly in specifically valenced or arousing words. These sound-meaning relationships can be used to calculate a top-down operationalization of phonological iconicity in words – the sublexical affective potential. In the first study of this dissertation, I contrast words with different sublexical affective potential in a lexical decision task, during which an electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded, to investigate its psychophysiological reality. In fact, the EEG components of the sublexical affective potential and the lexical affective content of words are similar in the timing of their occurrence (200 ─ 300 ms) and in their form (a posterior negativity), which speaks for a parallel affective processing at both language levels. In the second study, the sublexical affective potential was contrasted with the lexical affective content of a word. The EEG showed a significant interaction of the affective properties at the sublexical and the lexical level in form of an N400 component: Iconic words, i.e., consistent affective values at the sublexical and lexical level, are processed with less effort than non-iconic words – probably due to a facilitated lexical access. These findings emphasize the importance of iconicity as a functional linguistic mechanism. Furthermore, an applied reading study using emotional poetry was carried out: Affective properties at the sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical level of 57 poems were quantified and used as predictors in stepwise multiple regression analyses to explain the general affective meaning of the poems, collected by ratings. The regression results show that affective properties of all linguistic levels influence the affective and aesthetic perception of the poems. All in all, connotative affective meanings of words as well as phoneme segments together yield a useful holistic operationalization of phonological iconicity that allows the investigation of the role of iconicity in language processing.