Replicating the effects of iconicity in lexical decision task: a study in Brazilian Portuguese

Iconic words are characterized by a sense of resemblance between their form and their meaning. The most common examples are onomatopoeias such as “cock-a-doodle-doo” or “woof-woof,” but recent research shows that speakers of various languages perceive a relationship between some meaning in various words of their language. This is the case for English words such as crunchy, zigzag or wiggle, whose sonority is perceived as mapping onto their meaning (Winter et al., 2023). Recently, psycholinguistic research has investigated whether iconicity influence language processing. Sidhu, Vigliocco and Pexman (2020) ran a lexical decision task with words varying in their iconicity level. Their results show that the more iconic a word is, the quicker participants react to it in a lexical decision task, thus suggesting that iconicity may have a facilitatory effect in word recognition. We plan to replicate their study with a sample of Brazilian Portuguese speakers and Brazilian Portuguese words to test their main claim that reaction times in a classic lexical decision task could be influenced by the stimuli’s level of iconicity in a neurotypical population of adults.