Semantic Encoding and Decoding of Ideophones from the Perspective of Sound Iconicity: Issues and Prospects

The iconicity hypothesis in cognitive linguistics holds that there is a mapping relationship between the form of language and its meaning. Previous studies on sound iconicity placed limited focus on the lexical processing of the natural language. The psychological mechanism of processing sound iconicity in Chinese words remains unclear. The current study reviews former literature on the processing of ideophones (typical sound symbolic words) and summarizes previous research from three aspects: lexical processing, the neural mechanism underlying cross-modal mapping, and the encoding of entity and event meanings. The study concludes that sound iconicity could facilitate semantic access. However, this effect is susceptible to the experimental task and the presentation modality of the words. When the brain processes sound iconicity, it not only involves a modality-general processing hub (e.g., superior temporal sulcus and superior parietal cortex), but may also activate modality-specific areas based on the features of different modalities mapped from the phonetics. The current study divides these features into entity-relevant ones (size, shape, and color) and event-relevant ones (action and temporal features). The study finds that compared with entity meaning, sound iconicity has a better capability in encoding event meaning. Synthesizing previous literature, this paper proposes a cognitive processing model for the decoding of ideophones. Focusing on the sound iconicity phenomenon in Chinese, the paper looks forward to future research and aims to deepen the current understanding of the psychological processing mechanisms of sound iconicity in Chinese.