There are considerable gaps in our knowledge of how children develop abstract language. In this paper, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account, which proposes that emotional information is more essential for abstract than concrete conceptual development. We tested the recognition memory of 7- and 8-year-old children, as well as a group of adults, for abstract and concrete words which differed categorically in valence. Word valence significantly interacted with concreteness in hit rates of both children and adults, such that effects of (...) valence were only found in memory for abstract words. The pattern of valence effects differed for children and adults: children remembered negative words more accurately than neutral and positive words, whereas adults remembered negative and positive words more accurately than neutral words. In addition, signal detection analysis revealed that children were better able to discriminate negative than positive words, regardless of concreteness. The findings suggest that the memory accuracy of 7- and 8-year-old children is influenced by emotional information, particularly for abstract words. The results are in agreement with the Affective Embodiment Account and with multimodal accounts of children’s lexical development. (shrink)

Iconicity refers to a resemblance between word form and meaning. Previous work has shown that iconic words are learned earlier and processed faster. Here, we examined whether iconic words are recognized better on a recognition memory task. We also manipulated the level at which items were encoded—with a focus on either their meaning or their form—in order to gain insight into the mechanism by which iconicity would affect memory. In comparison with non‐iconic words, iconic words were associated with a higher (...) false alarm rate, a lower d’ score, and a lower response criterion in Experiment 1. We did not observe any interaction between iconicity and encoding condition. To test the generalizability of these findings, we examined effects of iconicity in a recognition memory megastudy across 3880 items. After controlling for a variety of lexical and semantic variables, iconicity was predictive of more hits and false alarms, and a lower response criterion in this dataset. In Experiment 2, we examined whether these effects were due to increased feelings of familiarity for iconic items by including a familiar versus recollect decision. This experiment replicated the overall results of Experiment 1 and found that participants were more likely to categorize words that they had seen before as familiar (vs. recollected) if they were iconic. Together, these results demonstrate that iconicity has an effect on memory. We discuss implications for theories of iconicity. (shrink)

Certain nonwords, like maluma and takete, are associated with roundness and sharpness, respectively. However, this has typically been demonstrated using explicit tasks. We investigated whether this association would be detectable using a more implicit measure—a sequential priming task. We began with a replication of the standard Maluma/Takete effect before examining whether round and sharp nonword primes facilitated the categorization of congruent shapes. We found modest evidence of a priming effect in response accuracy. We next examined whether nonword primes affected categorization (...) of ambiguous shapes, using visual and auditory primes. We found that ambiguous shapes were categorized as round more often following the presentation of a round nonword. This suggests that phonemes may activate related shape information which then affects the processing of shapes, and that this association emerges even when participants are not explicitly searching for it. (shrink)