"What we have shown is that the sound of a word can tell us - TopicsExpress

"What we have shown is that the sound of a word can tell us something about how it is used," said Morten Christiansen, associate professor of psychology at Cornell. "Specifically, it tells us whether the word is used as a noun or as a verb, and this relationship affects how we process such words." Christiansen, along with Thomas Farmer, a Cornell psychology graduate student, are co-authors of a paper about how the sounds of words contain information about their syntactic role. Their work will be published in the Aug. 8 print issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). To determine if the sound (phonology) of a word can indicate whether it is a noun or a verb, the researchers assessed the sounds of more than 3,000 nouns and verbs and analyzed their "relatedness" to one another. "Nouns that are typical of other nouns in terms of what they sound like are processed faster, and similarly for verbs that have sounds typical of verbs," said Christiansen. "We show that such phonological typicality [sound relatedness] affects both the speed with which we access words in isolation as well as when we process them in the context of other words in a sentence." sciencedaily/releases/2006/07/060726091554.htm