This paper presents a case study of sound symbolism, cases in which certain sounds tend to be associated with particular meanings. We used the corpus of all Japanese Pokémon names available as of October 2016. We tested the effects of voiced obstruents, mora counts, and vowel quality on Pokémon characters' size, weight, strength parameters, and evolution levels. We found that the number of voiced obstruents in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and general strength parameters, except for speed. We argue that this result is compatible with the frequency code hypothesis of Ohala. The number of moras in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and all strength parameters. Vowel height is also shown to have an influence on size and weight - Pokémon characters with initial high vowels tend to be smaller and lighter, although the effect size is not very large. Not only does this paper offer a new case study of sound symbolism, it provides evidence that sound symbolism is at work when naming proper nouns.

There has been a growing interest in sound symbolic patterns in natural languages, in which some sounds are associated with particular meanings. Previous corpus-based research identified some specific sound symbolic relationships in Pokémon naming patterns in Japanese (Kawahara et al. 2018b). One of the main findings was that the names of Pokémon characters are more likely to contain voiced obstruents, and are longer in terms of mora count, when the Pokémon characters undergo evolution (e.g. nyoromo → nyorozo; poppo → pijotto). The current study reports three experiments that test whether (i) these patterns are productive in the minds of general Japanese speakers, and whether (ii) the same tendency holds with English speakers. The results show that the effect of phonological length was clearly observed both with Japanese and English speakers; the effects of voiced obstruents were observed clearly with Japanese speakers, but less clearly with English speakers. Along the way, we address other general issues related to sound symbolism: (iii) to what extent the sound symbolic effects identified in Kawahara et al. (2018b) rely on familiarity with Pokémon, and (iv) whether word-initial segments invoke stronger images than word-internal segments. In addition to its research value, we emphasize that this general project on Pokémon names can be useful for undergraduate phonetics education.

This paper reports two case studies of sound symbolism using the naturalistic name corpora of characters from Disney and Pokémon. Building upon previous studies of sound symbolism, we tested two hypotheses: (1) voiced obstruents, which are generally associated with negative images, are favored in villainous characters’ names, while (2) bilabial consonants, which are symbolically associated with cuteness, are disfavored in such names. The results show that these tendencies hold in our corpora, suggesting that a concept that is as complex as “villain” can be signaled via sound symbolism. Theoretical implications for cognitive linguistics based on our results are discussed.