The role of valence and arousal for phonological iconicity in the lexicon of German: a cross-validation study using pseudoword ratings

The notion of sound symbolism receives increasing interest in psycholinguistics. Recent research – including empirical effects of affective phonological iconicity on language processing (Adelman et al., Citation2018; Conrad et al., Citation2022) – suggested language codes affective meaning at a basic phonological level using specific phonemes as sublexical markers of emotion. Here, in a series of 8 rating-experiments, we investigate the sensitivity of language users to assumed affectively-iconic systematic distribution patterns of phonemes across the German vocabulary: