To what extent do people attribute meanings to “nonsense” words? How general is such attribution of meaning? We used a set of words lacking conventional meanings to elicit drawings of made‐up creatures. Separate groups of participants rated the nonsense words and the drawings on several semantic dimensions, and selected what name best corresponded to each creature. Despite lacking conventional meanings, “nonsense” words elicited a high level of consistency in the produced drawings. Meaning attributions made to nonsense words corresponded with meaning attributions made by separate people to drawings that were inspired by the name. Naïve participants were able to recover the name that inspired the drawing with greater‐than‐chance accuracy. These results suggest that people make liberal and consistent use of non‐arbitrary relationships between forms and meanings.
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Learning modals: A grammatical perspective
In this study, we address the mapping problem for modal words: how do children learn the form‐to‐ meaning mappings for words like
- PAR ID:
- 10379720
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Language and Linguistics Compass
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 1749-818X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1-22
- Size(s):
- p. 1-22
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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