The Study On Psychological Reality Of Phonetic Iconicity In The Second Language

Phonetic iconicity is the connection between the phonetic and meaning of language sign.A large number of literatures have proved that phonetic iconicity has the psychological reality and is exists universally across cultures.Most of the existing researches on phonetic iconicity are on mother tongue or single language,and few people pay attention to phonetic iconicity in the second language.On the basis of previous studies,this study explores the psychological reality of Chinese-English bilinguals′phonetic iconicity(includ vowel iconicity and consonant iconicity)in the second language from explicit and implicit aspects,using the graph word matching task and the implicit interference paradigm.And the effect of second language proficiency on phonetic iconicity in the second language is also analyzed.The results of the explicit study in experiment 1 shows that the proportion of big mouth-vowel non-words choosing large figures is significantly higher than that of small figures,and the proportion of small mouth-vowel non-words choosing small figure is significantly higher than that of large figure;The proportion of voiceless consonant non-words choosing broken line figure was significantly higher than that of arc figure,and the proportion of voiced consonant non-words choosing arc figure was significantly higher than that of broken line figure;And there was no significant difference in the phonetic iconicity among different second language proficiency groups.The implicit results of experiment 2 shows that the accuracy and response time of Chinese-English bilinguals in the vowel iconicity condition are significantly better than those in the vowel iconicity inconsistent condition,and there is an interaction between vowel iconicity and vowel type,under the condition of consistent vowel iconicity,the accuracy of the big mouth-vowel non-words is significantly lower than that with small mouth-vowel non-words,while under the condition of inconsistency,the accuracy of the big mouth-vowel non-words is significantly higher than that with small mouth;The accuracy and response time of voiceless consonant non-words in the condition of consistent iconicity were better than those under the condition of inconsistent iconicity,but there is no significant difference in the accuracy and response time of voiced consonant non-words under the condition of consonant iconicity;And no significant difference is found in the consonant iconicity among different second language proficiency groups.The conclusions are as follows:(1)Chinese-English bilinguals has phonetic(vowels and consonants)iconicity explicit effect in the second language,namely in consciously,the character of vowel pronouncing by big/small mouth and big/small figure have iconicity coupling,and voiceless/voiced consonant pronunciation characteristics and broken line/arc figure have iconicity coupling,this proves the psychological reality of phonetic iconicity in the second language.(2)The Chinese-English bilinguals partly have the implicit effect of phonetic iconicity in the second language,that is,with unconscious participation,there is vowel iconicity,and the iconicity connection between small mouth-vowel and small figure is stronger.The consonant iconicity exists partly,there is the iconicity connection between voiceless consonant non-words and broken line figure,and the iconicity of voiced consonants and arc figure does not exist.(3)The second language proficiency has no effect on the implicit and explicit effects of phonetic iconicity in the second language.