Abstract

Recent research has suggested that an inherent or non-arbitrary base for language exists, especially with regards to the concept of sound symbolism. Nygaard, Cook, and Namy (2009) presented evidence that participants learned the true meanings of spoken Japanese words more easily than a set of random, erroneous translations. We suggest that their curious finding may be better described as a prosody effect than a sound symbolism effect. If the stimuli were created with rich prosody, those cues could facilitate learning irrespective of each word’s phonology. We replicated and extended the work of Nygaard et al. by testing learning across recognition memory (a direct replication) and recall tasks, using stimuli that were generated with or without magnified prosody. A follow up study was conducted in which recall memory was employed to omit confounds identified in the previous study. We were unable to replicate results indicated in the work of Nygaard et al. Therefore, we suggest that the recognition memory task is currently inconclusive in determining sound symbolic interaction. In a similar recall memory task, participants’ performance was inhibited by the presence of prosody for random translation word pairs. These results support the notion that prosody has an influence on language learning capabilities, particularly an adverse effect when translations are incorrect. Further analysis must be conducted into the influence of sound symbolism to determine its impact on language comprehension.