Arbitrariness of sound symbolysm in English and Japanese (original) (raw)
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Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary
Entropy, 2010
The relationship between meanings of words and their sound shapes is to a large extent arbitrary, but it is well known that languages exhibit sound symbolism effects violating arbitrariness. Evidence for sound symbolism is typically anecdotal, however. Here we present a systematic approach. Using a selection of basic vocabulary in nearly one half of the world's languages we find commonalities among sound shapes for words referring to same concepts. These are interpreted as due to sound symbolism. Studying the effects of sound symbolism cross-linguistically is of key importance for the understanding of language evolution.
Sound-symbolism: A Piece in the Puzzle of Word Learning
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2006
Sound-symbolism is the idea that the relationship between word sounds and word meaning is not arbitrary for all words, but rather that there are subsets of words in the world’s languages for which sounds and their symbols have some degree of correspondence. The present research investigates sound-symbolism as a possible route to the learning of an unknown word’s meaning. Three studies compared the guesses that adult participants made regarding the potential meanings of sound-symbolic and non-sound symbolic obsolete words. In each study, participants were able to generate better definitions for sound-symbolic words when compared to non-sound symbolic words. Participants were also more likely to recognize the meanings of sound symbolic words. The superior performance on sound-symbolic words held even when definitions generated on the basis of sound association were eliminated. It is concluded that sound symbolism is a word property that influences word learning.
The natural motivation of sound symbolism
This dissertation examines systematic sound-meaning correspondences in sound-symbolic words from a cross-linguistic perspective, investigating whether and to what degree they are naturally motivated. Its aims are to assess empirical evidence for the Explanatory Sound-symbolism Hypothesis (ESH): that sound symbolism is primarily governed by natural motivation, in particular, by a connection between human perceptual and language systems. The languages examined are Korean and English, which are genealogically unrelated.
The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2014
Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel bet...
The typology of sound symbolism: Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic features
Linguistic Typology, 2020
Sound symbolism emerged as a prevalent component in the origin and development of language. However, as previous studies have either been lacking in scope or in phonetic granularity, the present study investigates the phonetic and semantic features involved from a bottom-up perspective. By analyzing the phonemes of 344 near-universal concepts in 245 language families, we establish 125 sound-meaning associations. The results also show that between 19 and 40 of the items of the Swadesh-100 list are sound symbolic, which calls into question the list's ability to determine genetic relationships. In addition, by combining co-occurring semantic and phonetic features between the sound symbolic concepts, 20 macro-concepts can be identified, e. g. basic descriptors, deictic distinctions and kinship attributes. Furthermore, all identified macro-concepts can be grounded in four types of sound symbolism: (a) unimodal imitation (onomatopoeia); (b) cross-modal imitation (vocal gestures); (c) dia-grammatic mappings based on relation (relative); or (d) situational mappings (circumstantial). These findings show that sound symbolism is rooted in the human perception of the body and its interaction with the surrounding world,
The facilitatory role of sound symbolism in infant word learning
2013
The facilitatory role of sound symbolism in infant word learning Michiko Miyazaki 1 (myzk@lab.tamagawa.ac.jp), Shohei Hidaka 2 (shhidaka@jaist.ac.jp), Mutsumi Imai 3 (imai@sfc.keio.ac.jp), H. Henny Yeung 4 (henny.yeung@parisdescartes.fr), Katerina Kantartzis 5 (k.f.kantartzis@bham.ac.uk), Hiroyuki Okada 1 (h.okada@eng.tamagawa.ac.jp), Sotaro Kita 5 (S.Kita@bham.ac.uk) Brain Science Institute, Tamagawa University, JAPAN, School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, JAPAN Department of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, JAPAN Universite Paris Descartes, & CNRS (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, UMR 8158), FRANCE School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK Abstract Sound symbolism or the nonarbitrary link between language sound and meaning are commonly found across many languages of the world. A well-known example is the association between rounded vs. angular shapes and labels (i.e., the Bouba-kiki effect by Kohler,...
2013
Sound symbolism or the nonarbitrary link between language sound and meaning are commonly found across many languages of the world. A well-known example is the association between rounded vs. angular shapes and labels (i.e., the Bouba-kiki effect by Köhler, 1929/1947). Previous research has shown that sound symbolic words play facilitative role for preschool children's novel verb learning (Imai, Kita, Nagumo & Okada, 2008; Kantartiz, Imai & Kita, 2011), helping children identify what aspects of motion events should be mapped to verbs. In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may facilitate language learning in human infants who have just begun to learn word meanings. Sound symbolism may be a useful cue particularly at the earliest stages of word learning, because this cue seems to be available without needing prior word learning experience (Gogate & Hollich, 2010). Using a habituation paradigm and a Bayesian model-based analysis, we demonstrated that 14-month-old infants could detect Köhlertype (1947) shape-sound symbolism, and could use this sensitivity in their effort to establish the word-referent association.
The building blocks of sound symbolism
2020
Languages contain thousands of words each and are made up by a seemingly endless collection of sound combinations. Yet a subsection of these show clear signs of corresponding word shapes for the same meanings which is generally known as vocal iconicity and sound symbolism. This dissertation explores the boundaries of sound symbolism in the lexicon from typological, functional and evolutionary perspectives in an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the role sound symbolism plays in human language. In order to achieve this, the subject in question was triangulated by investigating different methodologies which included lexical data from a large number of language families, experiment participants and robust statistical tests.Study I investigates basic vocabulary items in a large number of language families in order to establish the extent of sound symbolic items in the core of the lexicon, as well as how the sound-meaning associations are mapped and interconnected. This study ...
Language and Cognition, 2012
There exists a fundamental paradox in linguistic cognition. Experiments show consistent sound-symbolic biases in people's processing of artificial words, yet the biases are not manifest in the structure of real words. To address this paradox, we designed an experiment to test the magnitude and source of these biases. Participants were tasked with matching nonsense words to novel object forms. One group was implicitly taught a matching rule congruent with biases reported previously, while a second group was taught a rule incongruent with this bias. In test trials, participants in the congruent condition performed only modestly but significantly better than chance and better than participants in the incongruent condition who performed at chance. These outcomes indicate the processing bias is real but weak and reflects an inherent learning bias. We discuss implications for language learning and transmission, considering the functional value of non-arbitrariness in language structur...
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1998
As predicted on the basis of the developmental linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson, the proportional use of categories of phonemes which are mastered by children at an early age, for example, back vowels, bilabial consonants, stop consonants, was weakly and positively correlated with people's ratings of the tendency of nouns to create "clear mental images" for them. The proportional use of categories mastered later, for example, front vowels, lax vowels, sibilants, was weakly and negatively correlated with imagery. Predictions of word emotionality based on the same theory were not confirmed.