Ideophones , or run-in that sound like what they mean — words whose sound conjure up the sensorial experience they describe , likeswishortwinkle — are easier to learn than other word , a Modern study finds . Thepaper , publish in theJournal of Experimental Psychology : Learning , Memory , and Cognition , finds that something about these words makes them easier to discover in a foreign language .
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in the Netherlands try Dutch students ’ power to learn Nipponese ideophones likebokiboki , a full term that means the cracking sound of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree branches or metacarpophalangeal joint , andfuwafuwa , a word that means fluffy . First , they tested whether 26 native Dutch speaker unit could reckon the translations of Nipponese ideophones . The scholar guessed correctly more than 63 percent of the time — above what would be expected with random chance . In subsequent mental test , the research worker only used the ideophones that had been approximate right most often in this first test .
In one experiment , 32 participants took repeat quiz to find out the meaning of 38 Japanese ideophones—19 real translations , and 19 fake translation that were the opponent of the true import . Volunteers had more trouble remembering word whose wrong ( paired ) meaning they instruct than words they larn with their right translations . They also responded faster to the question with the words and their right meaning , and got better at the ideophone translations over several practice rounds .
In another test , a new mathematical group of 30 participant guessed the meaning of unidentified Japanese adjective ( not ideophones ) . Though they guessed the correct meaning with more or less better than chance accuracy , they did n’t improve after several erudition rounds .
“ Our results suggest that phone - symbolism in ideophones is universally perceivable to at least some extent , and that not only children but also adults can apply intelligent - symbolical cues to bootstrap discussion learning , ” the investigator write .
