Verb learning seems especially difficult for children learning many languages, at least relative to nouns. Many have speculated because this is because verbs refer to relational events that are components of much more complex events. Consider a buying-selling event. If the child hears the verb “buy”, does it mean sell, get, handover, give money, or perhaps smile? By this view, a key problem in ...

Although the sound-meaning relationship is often arbitrary (Saussure 1916), cases exist in which some sounds correspond to certain meanings. Such association between sounds and meanings is known as sound symbolism, and there has been a longstanding interest in the existence and the nature of sound symbolism. This paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that cert...

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of non-arbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese may aid early verb learning, and a recent extende...

The history of chemical nomenclature and symbolism is resplendent not only with proposals that were once widely used in the chemical literature, but which have since been displaced by more modern developments, but also with those which, however logical, were doomed to oblivion almost from their inception and which now survive as historical relics to be found only in the papers and books of thei...

Koriat (1975), using a word-matching phonetic symbolism task, found a significant relationship between translation accuracy and the degree of subjective confidence associated with the response. This study examined the hypothesis that since responses on which subjects are in consensus are more likely correct than incorrect, confidence ratings may actually be related to the degree of consensus, r...

IT is known that the game of chess originated in India. It was passed on to the medieval West through the intermediary of the Persians and the Arabs, a fact to which we owe, for example, the expression "check-mate", (German: Schachmatt) which is derived from the Persian shah: "king" and the Arabic mat: "he is dead". At the time of the Renaissance some of the rules of the game were changed: the ...