Iconicity in Portuguese and its Relationship with Age of Acquisition and Parts of Speech
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/2237-2083.34.1.81-105Keywords:
iconicity, age of acquisition, parts of speech, interlinguistic comparison, PortugueseAbstract
Iconicity can be defined as a resemblance between certain aspects of a linguistic form and certain aspects of its meaning. To investigate the role of this property in the acquisition of Portuguese words, we replicated the experiment conducted by Perry, Perlman, and Lupyan (2015) and collected iconicity ratings from 504 participants for a sample of 521 words. Based on these ratings, we examined the relationship between iconicity and age of acquisition, a relationship mediated by factors such as frequency and concreteness. We used the word corpus and age-of-acquisition norms for Portuguese available in the MCDI (MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory); we relied on word frequency data from O Corpus do Português, and we conducted an independent concreteness-rating experiment. Using linear regression analyses, our results indicate that words acquired earlier tend to show higher iconicity ratings in Brazilian Portuguese. When comparing our findings with those reported for English (Winter et al., 2023) and Spanish (Hinojosa et al., 2021), we found that, as in both languages, onomatopoeias and interjections received the highest iconicity scores in Portuguese. However, diverging from the patterns reported for English and Spanish, verbs in Brazilian Portuguese received higher scores than nouns; in Spanish, no significant difference was observed, whereas in English, verbs received higher ratings.
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