Remembering More Nouns Than Verbs in Lists of Foreign-Language Words as an Indicator of Syntactic Phonetic Symbolism

Abstract

In lists with words from languages not known to the subjects (students of the University of Essen, Germany, and in one experiment Polish teachers in North Poland), nouns were remembered more often than verbs, and the effect was not dependent on the length of the words. The effect was clearer with languages with a strong (Swahili) or medium (Hungarian, Turkish) tendency to marcation and less with languages with a tendency for weak marcation (Japanese). We interpreted this effect as influenced by syntactic phonetic symbolism, assuming there is a phonologic and prosodic difference between nouns and verbs