Does the sound of a word (phonology) tell you anything about how it is used (its lexical category)? Or is the relationship arbitrary? The standard view since Saussure has been NO, there is no correlation between word sound and word meaning. However, a recent paper by Cornell University researchers argues that adults do use the relationship between how nouns and verbs sound and how they are used to guide their sentence comprehension.
The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to which UBC Library subscribes. Read it here, or, read the news brief from Newswise for a quick summary.