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- Genre: Masters Thesis
The Wham-Womb Sound Symbolic Effect: English-Speaking Children and Adults Link Phonemes with Arousal
Description
Sound symbolism—the association between word sounds and meaning—has been shown to be an effective communication tool that promotes language comprehension and word learning. Much of the literature is constrained to investigating sound as it relates to physical characteristics (e.g. size or shape), and research has predominantly studied the phenomenon in adults. The current study examined the sound symbolic wham-womb effect, which postulates that words with the /æ/ phoneme are associated with increased arousal while words with the /u/ phoneme are associated with little to no arousal. The effect was tested in both adults and children aged 5-7 years old using a word-to-scene matching task. Participants were presented with two pseudowords (differing only by their vowel phoneme: /æ/ or /u/; e.g. smad and smood) and two scenes depicting an animal in either a more arousing or less arousing situation. Participants were then asked to match which of the scenes fit one of the pseudowords. Results showed that the trial-by-trial performance for adults and children were significantly greater than chance, indicating that the wham-womb effect is exhibited in both adults and children. There was also a significant difference in performance between adults and children, with adults showing a more robust effect. This study provides the first empirical evidence that both children and adults link phonemes to arousal and that this effect may change across development.
ContributorsKuo, Jillian Elaine (Author) / Benitez, Viridiana (Thesis advisor) / McBeath, Michael (Committee member) / Scherer, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
A multitude of individuals across the globe suffer from hearing loss and that number continues to grow. Cochlear implants, while having limitations, provide electrical input for users enabling them to "hear" and more fully interact socially with their environment. There has been a clinical shift to the bilateral placement of implants in both ears and to bimodal placement of a hearing aid in the contralateral ear if residual hearing is present. However, there is potentially more to subsequent speech perception for bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant users than the electric and acoustic input being received via these modalities. For normal listeners vision plays a role and Rosenblum (2005) points out it is a key feature of an integrated perceptual process. Logically, cochlear implant users should also benefit from integrated visual input. The question is how exactly does vision provide benefit to bilateral and bimodal users. Eight (8) bilateral and 5 bimodal participants received randomized experimental phrases previously generated by Liss et al. (1998) in auditory and audiovisual conditions. The participants recorded their perception of the input. Data were consequently analyzed for percent words correct, consonant errors, and lexical boundary error types. Overall, vision was found to improve speech perception for bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant participants. Each group experienced a significant increase in percent words correct when visual input was added. With vision bilateral participants reduced consonant place errors and demonstrated increased use of syllabic stress cues used in lexical segmentation. Therefore, results suggest vision might provide perceptual benefits for bilateral cochlear implant users by granting access to place information and by augmenting cues for syllabic stress in the absence of acoustic input. On the other hand vision did not provide the bimodal participants significantly increased access to place and stress cues. Therefore the exact mechanism by which bimodal implant users improved speech perception with the addition of vision is unknown. These results point to the complexities of audiovisual integration during speech perception and the need for continued research regarding the benefit vision provides to bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant users.
ContributorsLudwig, Cimarron (Author) / Liss, Julie (Thesis advisor) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015