The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki . Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki . These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.
Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizations could have played a similar role. We report the first extensive cross-cultural study investigating whether people from diverse linguistic backgrounds can understand novel vocalizations for a range of meanings. In two comprehension experiments, we tested whether vocalizations produced by English speakers could be understood by listeners from 28 languages from 12 language families. Listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested. Our findings challenge the often-cited idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation, demonstrating that in the absence of words people can use vocalizations to communicate a variety of meanings.
We present a novel, data-driven approach to assessing mutual similarities and differences among a group of languages, based on purely prosodic characteristics, namely f0 and energy envelope signals. These signals are decomposed using continuous wavelet transform; the components represent f0 and energy patterns on three levels of prosodic hierarchy roughly corresponding to syllables, words and phrases. Unigram language models with states derived from a combination of ∆-features obtained from these components are trained and compared using a mutual perplexity measure. In this pilot study we apply this approach to a small corpus of spoken material from seven languages (Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, German, Swedish, Russian and Slovak) with a rich history of mutual language contacts. We present similarity trees (dendrograms) derived from the models using the hierarchically decomposed prosodic signals separately as well as combined, and compare them with patterns obtained from non-decomposed signals. We show that (1) plausible similarity patterns, reflecting language family relationships and the known contact history can be obtained even from a relatively small data set, and (2) the hierarchical decomposition approach using both f0 and energy provides the most comprehensive results.
We present results of a statistical hierarchical analysis of areal variation in prosody of spoken North Sámi languages. The hierarchical analysis method compares unigram models using cross-entropy measure. The models depict distributions of ∆features of f0 and energy signals decomposed using Continuous Wavelet Transform. These signals are obtained from speech recordings of five areal North Sámi varieties recorded in sites in northern Finland and Norway. We evaluate three potential sources of areal variation in prosodic characteristics of these five areal varieties: (1) traditional dialectal analysis of North Sámi, (2) influence of the relevant majority languages, and (3) geographical distance. Our results show a significant positive correlation between crossentropy distances between models and geographical distances between recording sites, demonstrating a viability of the method for typological analysis. Prosodic characteristics of the areal varieties are also influenced by majority languages, and, to a smaller degree, by differences between the North Sámi dialectal varieties.
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