Contrary to the classic idea of arbitrariness in mappings between words and meanings, many languages have words that mimic the sounds of their referents (onomatopoeia) and other subtler sound symbolic associations. However, our knowledge concerning the characteristics of sound-meaning links is still limited. Previous research mostly focused on languages with a large (e.g., Japanese) or limited (e.g., English) inventory of sound symbolic words. We conducted a word-production study with native speakers of Turkish, a language with a moderate amount of sound symbolic words, and examined links between sound properties (e.g., voiced vs. voiceless) and semantic dimensions (e.g., size, speed) in describing motions. Some of the sound-meaning links identified were the links found in Japanese and English samples in previous studies (Saji et al., 2019), whereas many seem to be specific to Turkish. This study provides initial evidence for language-specific sound symbolism in Turkish and links that are consistent across languages.

This research investigated the acquisition process of the color lexicon, specifically how color words are initially grounded and develop into the lexical system possessed by the adults in the ambient language. We conducted a longitudinal study in which Japanese-learning 2-year- olds were tested every month on their understanding of basic words denoting 8 chromatic colors, continuing until they were able to map these words onto their referents consistently. The results strongly endorse the view that acquisition of the color lexicon should be characterized as a process of system construction, through which children reorganize prelinguistic color categories onto the linguistic categories of the ambient language, thereby representations of individual words are continuously refined along with the refinement of the representation of the system as a whole.

The present study investigated how children learn the meanings of basic color words and are immersed into the language-specific system of the color lexicon. The study examined how children discover the boundaries of color names by having 3-, 4-, and 5- year-old children produce names for 93 color patches. We found that even 3-year-olds children can map color words to its typical referents. At the same time, they struggle to delineate the boundaries between neighboring color words. The results indicated that, in learning color words, children continuously restructure the entire semantic domain by discovering and adjusting the linguistic boundaries between the neighboring words

This research investigated how German-speaking children learn color words, both in terms of centroid mappings and boundary delineation, and how they construct the color lexicon as a connected system. The results were compared to those of Japanese children to draw insights on general mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of words in the color lexicon. For both languages, input frequency and category size contributed to the ease of learning. In contrast, in both language groups, naming (in)consistency in adults predicted the adult-like boundary delineation.