Echoes of Emotion: Effects of Affective Iconicity on Language Processing

This thesis investigates the phenomenon of affective iconicity – a resemblance-based mapping between linguistic form and meaning in the affective domain – thereby challenging traditional notions of arbitrariness in language as being solely based on convention. Through a series of overall 11 studies involving 233 participants – presented across four publications (Conrad et al., 2022; Schmidtke & Conrad, 2018; Schmidtke & Conrad, 2024; Schmidtke et al., 2024) – and employing diverse methodologies, including subjective ratings, measures of response latencies, and neurophysiological recordings of event-related potentials (ERPs), this research demonstrates that both valence and arousal contribute to effects of affective iconicity, albeit via potentially different mechanisms with varying degrees of prevalence across the lexicon.