Effects of lexical semantics on acoustic prominence

This paper explores the representations underlying lexical semantics. In particular, we test whether a word’s meaning can affect a word’s articulation. In Experiment 1, participants produced high-effort (e.g., yelling) and low-effort (e.g., chatting) words that are semantically related to articulati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLanguage and cognition Vol. 8; no. 2; pp. 314 - 334
Main Authors LEWIS, MOLLY L., WATSON, DUANE G.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.06.2016
Subjects
Acoustics
Articulation
Cognition & reasoning
Experiments
Language
Lexical semantics
Linguistics
Phonetics
Prosody
Semantics
Sound intensity
Verbs
Vocalization
Word meaning
situated cognition
language production
embodied cognition
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Summary:This paper explores the representations underlying lexical semantics. In particular, we test whether a word’s meaning can affect a word’s articulation. In Experiment 1, participants produced high-effort (e.g., yelling) and low-effort (e.g., chatting) words that are semantically related to articulation, as well as words that are semantically unrelated to articulation (e.g., kicking). We found that vocal words were produced with greater intensity than non-vocal words. In Experiment 2, we explored the specificity of this effect by investigating how words semantically related to the mouth, but unrelated to vocalization (e.g., chewing) were articulated. Analyses revealed that mouth words did not differ from controls, and we replicated the vocal effects from Experiment 1, suggesting fine-grain motor activation from lexical semantics. Experiment 3 revealed that the semantics of a verb influences the prosodic intensity of a sentence prior to the onset of the verb. Together, these data suggest aspects of lexical meaning influence prosody, and that motor representations may underlie lexical semantics.
ISSN:1866-9808
1866-9859
DOI:10.1017/langcog.2015.3