What drives sound symbolism? Different acoustic cues underlie sound-size and sound-shape mappings (original) (raw)
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Sound symbolism in vowels: Vowel quality, duration and pitch in sound-to-size correspondence
Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2000
The study investigates sound symbolism, concentrating on vowel quality, duration, and pitch in sound-to-size correspondences. Thirty-one native speakers of Polish were asked to rate presented stimuli on a 1-7 point scale ranging from "small" to "big". The stimuli consisted of /CVC/ sequences, with all six non-nasalized Polish vowels, blocked in three groups. In the first group, vowel quality was investigated, with duration and pitch unaltered. In the second group, vowel was manipulated to increase its duration by 50% relative to a baseline condition. In the third group, F0 of a vowel was linearly downshifted by a scaling factor of 0.8. The results revealed that neither vowel quality nor lowered pitch significantly influenced size ratings. Vowel duration, however, yielded significantly different ratings compared to a baseline condition. Longer durational values yielded "bigger" measures relative to normal duration. This result is taken as evidence that vowel duration has a relatively more robust effect on perception of size in Polish compared to vowel quality and pitch.
What's next for size-sound symbolism?
Frontiers in Language Sciences
This text reviews recent research in phonetic size-sound symbolism – non-arbitrary attributions of size properties to speech acoustic properties. Evidence from a wide range of research works is surveyed, and recent findings from research on the relationships between fundamental frequency, vowel articulation, consonant articulation, phonation type, mora count, and phonemic position, are discussed. It is argued that a satisfactory explanatory model of phonetic size-sound symbolism should meet two criteria: they should be able to explain both (1) the relationship between size and speech acoustics (Association criterion), and (2) the inconsistent findings observed across languages in the relevant literature (the Inconsistency criterion). Five theories are briefly discussed: The frequency code, Embodied cognition, Sound-meaning bootstrapping, Sapir-Whorf hypotheses, and Stochastic drift. It is contended that no currently available explanatory model of size-sound symbolism adequately meet...
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 ...
Weighing up the evidence for sound symbolism: Distributional properties predict cue strength
Journal of Memory and Language, 2018
It is well-established that there are relationships between word meaning and certain letters or phonemes, a phenomenon known as sound symbolism. Most sound symbolism studies have relied on a small stimulus set chosen to maximize the probability of finding an effect for a particular semantic category. Attempts to assign weights to sound symbolic cues have been limited by a methodology that has relied largely on forced contrast judgments, which do not allow systematic assignment of weights on the sound symbolic cues. We used a novel research approach designed to allow us to assign weights to sound symbolic cues. Participants made binary yes/no judgments about thousands of randomly-generated nonwords, deciding if they were good examples for each of 18 different semantic categories. Formal cues reliably predicted membership in several of those categories. We show that there is a strong inverse relationship between the average beta weight assigned to a phonological feature, phoneme, or letter, and the frequency of that cue. Our results also extend claims about the source of sound symbolic effects, by demonstrating that different poles of the same semantic dimension differ in their predictability from form cues; that some previously unsuspected dimensions show strong symbolic effects; and that features, phonemes, and letters may all contribute to sound symbolism.
Semantic Associations Dominate Over Perceptual Associations in Vowel- Size Iconicity
i-Perception, 2019
We tested the influence of perceptual features on semantic associations between the acoustic characteristics of vowels and the notion of size. To this end, we designed an experiment in which we manipulated size on two dissociable levels: the physical size of the pictures presented during the experiment (perceptual level) and the implied size of the objects depicted in the pictures (semantic level). Participants performed an Implicit Association Test in which the pictures of small objects were larger than those of large objects-that is, the actual size ratio on the semantic level was inverted on the perceptual level. Our results suggest that participants matched visual and acoustic stimuli in accordance with the content of the pictures (i.e., the inferred size of the depicted object), whereas directly perceivable features (i.e., the physical size of the picture) had only a marginal influence on participants' performance. Moreover, as the experiment has been conducted at two different sites (Japan and Germany), the results also suggest that the participants' cultural background or mother tongue had only a negligible influence on the effect. Our results, therefore, support the assumption that associations across sensory modalities can be motivated by the semantic interpretation of presemantic stimuli.
PloS one, 2017
The concept of sound iconicity implies that phonemes are intrinsically associated with non-acoustic phenomena, such as emotional expression, object size or shape, or other perceptual features. In this respect, sound iconicity is related to other forms of cross-modal associations in which stimuli from different sensory modalities are associated with each other due to the implicitly perceived correspondence of their primal features. One prominent example is the association between vowels, categorized according to their place of articulation, and size, with back vowels being associated with bigness and front vowels with smallness. However, to date the relative influence of perceptual and conceptual cognitive processing on this association is not clear. To bridge this gap, three experiments were conducted in which associations between nonsense words and pictures of animals or emotional body postures were tested. In these experiments participants had to infer the relation between visual ...
Explorations of Sound Symbolism and Iconicity
2019
Sound symbolism refers to the finding that individuals have biases to associate certain language sounds (i.e., phonemes) with certain perceptual and/or semantic features (see Lockwood & Dingemanse, 2015; Sidhu & Pexman, 2018a). An example of this is the association between the phoneme /i/ (as in heed) and smallness. This is of special interest to language because it can enable iconic relationships between form and meaning: instances in which a word's form maps onto its meaning via resemblance. For instance, the word teeny contains a vowel associated with smallness, and refers to something small. Iconicity can also exist through direct resemblance, in which a form imitates the meaning to which it refers (e.g., bang, woosh). In Chapter 2 I synthesize the existing sound symbolism literature to arrive at five potential mechanisms that could give rise to the associations between phonemes and features. I also discuss as yet unanswered questions for the field and propose ways in which ...
Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2017
Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (e.g., objects of a certain size or shape). Some of the best-known examples include the mil/mal effect (Sapir, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239, 1929) and the maluma/takete effect (Köhler, 1929). Interest in this topic has been on the rise within psychology, and studies have demonstrated that sound symbolic effects are relevant for many facets of cognition, including language, action, memory, and categorization. Sound symbolism also provides a mechanism by which words' forms can have nonarbitrary, iconic relationships with their meanings. Although various proposals have been put forth for how phonetic features (both acoustic and articulatory) come to be associated with stimuli, there is as yet no generally agreed-upon explanation. We review five proposals: statistical co-occurrence between phonetic features and associated stimuli in the environment, a shared property among phonetic features and stimuli; neural factors; species-general, evolved associations; and patterns extracted from language. We identify a number of outstanding questions that need to be addressed on this topic and suggest next steps for the field.
Sharp and round shapes of seen objects have distinct influences on vowel and consonant articulation
Psychological Research, 2016
The shape and size-related sound symbolism phenomena assume that, for example, the vowel [i] and the consonant [t] are associated with sharp-shaped and small-sized objects whereas [ɑ] and [m] are associated with round and large objects. It has been proposed that these phenomena are mostly based on involvement of articulatory processes in representing shape and size properties of objects. For example, [i] might be associated with sharp and small objects because it is produced by a specific front-close shape of articulators. Nevertheless, very little work has examined whether these object properties indeed have impact on speech sound vocalization. In the present study, the participants were presented with a sharp or round-shaped object in a small or large size. They were required to pronounce one out of two meaningless speech units (e.g., [i] or [ɑ]) according to the size or shape of the object. We investigated how a task-irrelevant object property (e.g., the shape when responses are made according to size) influences reaction times, accuracy, intensity, fundamental frequency, formant 1 and formant 2 of vocalizations. The size did not influence vocal responses but shape did. Specifically, the vowel [i] and consonant [t] were vocalized relatively rapidly when the object was sharp-shaped whereas [u] and [m] were vocalized relatively rapidly when the object was roundshaped. The study supports the view that the shape-related sound symbolism phenomena might reflect mapping of the perceived shape with corresponding articulatory gestures.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2022
Sound symbolism is the phenomenon by which certain kinds of phonemes are associated with perceptual and/or semantic properties. In this article, we explored size sound symbolism (i.e., the mil/mal effect) in which high-front vowels (e.g., /i/) show an association with smallness, while low-back vowels (e.g., /ɑ/) show an association with largeness. This has previously been demonstrated with nonwords, but its impact on the processing of real language is unknown. We investigated this using a size judgement task, in which participants classified words for small or large objects, containing a small- or large-associated vowel, based on their size. Words were presented auditorily in Experiment 1 and visually in Experiment 2. We did not observe an effect of vowel congruence (i.e., between object size and the size association of its vowel) in either of the experiments. This suggests that there are limits to the impact of sound symbolism on the processing of real language.