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Updated: Jul 7, 2025

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Sound-meaning associations allow listeners to infer the meaning of foreign language words
Sayuri Hayakawa1, Viorica Marian2
1Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA.
Abstract:
An attribute of human language is the seemingly arbitrary association between a word's form and meaning. We provide evidence that the meaning of foreign words can be partially deduced from phonological form. Monolingual English speakers listened to 45 antonym word pairs in nine foreign languages and judged which English words corresponded to these words' respective meanings. Despite no proficiency in the foreign language tested, participants' accuracy was higher than chance in each language. Words that shared meaning across languages were more likely to share phonological form. Accuracy in judging meaning from form was associated with participants' verbal working memory and with how consistently phonological and semantic features of words covaried across unrelated languages. A follow-up study with native Spanish speakers replicated the results. We conclude that sound maps to meaning in natural languages with some regularity, and sensitivity to form-meaning mappings indexes broader cognitive functions.
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