Incipient Constituents: Phonesthemes Facilitate Word Processing in English

Phonesthemes are sound clusters that recur in words with related meanings. For example, glow, gleam, and glitter begin with the phonestheme /gl/. Experiments with pseudowords provide evidence that phonesthemes affect how people retrieve and represent meanings, which suggests that phonesthemes capture language evolution in action, namely the emergence of compositionality. However, there is little evidence that phonesthemes affect how people process familiar words with established meanings. We therefore investigated whether phonesthemes facilitate visual word recognition and affect semantic representations in English. In two lexical decision experiments, people recognized words that contain phonesthemes faster and more accurately than control words, and phonesthemes amplified N170 ERPs; and in four lexical decision megastudies, phonesthemes predicted faster visual word recognition (but not faster auditory recognition). In two semantic relatedness experiments, we found only limited evidence that phonesthemes affect interpretation: Decisions were slower and less accurate for words containing incongruent phonesthemes (e.g., /gl/ misled people about the meaning of glove), but only in the online experiment, with a marginal effect of accuracy in the lab-based experiment and an amplified N400 ERP in frontal sites (but not the expected centroparietal sites). Our findings demonstrate that people process words which contain phonesthemes differently than they process controls, consistent with the hypothesis that phonesthemes inhabit a middle ground between morphemes and meaningless strings of letters, but our findings also demonstrate that, unsurprisingly, these quasi-meaningful constituents have only small effects in how people represent the meanings of familiar words. We discuss implications for morphology, language evolution, and natural language processing.