The Specificity of Sound Symbolic Correspondences in Spoken Language

Abstract

Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, sound symbolism, or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound-to-meaning correspondences. However, little is known about the specificity of these mappings. The present study investigated whether sound symbolic properties correspond to specific meanings, or whether these properties generalize across semantic dimensions. In three experiments, native English-speaking adults heard sound symbolic foreign words for dimensional adjective pairs (big/small, round/pointy, fast/slow, moving/still) and for each foreign word, selected a translation among English antonyms that either matched or mismatched with the correct meaning dimension. Listeners agreed more reliably on the English translation for matched relative to mismatched dimensions, though reliable cross-dimensional mappings did occur. These findings suggest that although sound symbolic properties generalize to meanings that may share overlapping semantic features, sound symbolic mappings offer semantic specificity.

Acoustic and Visual Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondences

“…The pervasiveness of sound symbolism across languages supports the theory that it may have an important role in language learning (Imai et al, 2015;Kantartzis, Imai, & Kita S, 2011;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2017). Individuals are even able to correctly assign meanings of synonym/antonym pairs above chance for languages with which they are unfamiliar (Kunihara, 1971;Nygaard et al, 2009;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2016). Our study suggests that one potential motivated connection between sound and meaning is the set of acoustic properties to which listeners are sensitive and that translate systematically into a set of visual properties.…”

“…These studies show that the existence of sound-symbolic CCs in language is both prolific and robust. Further, language users are sensitive to sound-symbolic correspondences in that they actively utilize these associations to correctly assign meaning to foreign synonym-antonym pairs at above-chance levels (Nygaard, et al, 2009;Revill et al, 2014;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2016). Soundsymbolic CCs also seem to play a role in language processing and early word learning (Imai & Kita, 2014).…”

Language is more abstract than you think, or, why aren't languages more iconic?

“…It is also worth noting that nearly all experimental demonstrations of iconicity have investigated concrete meanings [8], such as the famous kiki/bouba stimuli which are associated with spiky or round visual shapes [131,132]. To the extent that semantic generalizability of iconic forms has been experimentally demonstrated, this generalizability is of a limited type [83]. By pitting semantic notions of size (e.g.…”

Function of Sound Devices in the Construction of Metaphoric Meaning in Poetry

“…The results of an experiment on phonetic symbolism (D'Anselmo, Prete, Zdybek, Tommasi, & Brancucci, 2019) demonstrated that the participants were able to guess the meaning of unfamiliar spoken words due to the symbolic nature of their acoustic properties. Three experiments carried out by Tzeng, Nygaard and Namy (2016) also proved that the sound properties contributed to the inferring of word meaning. Fónagy (2001) showed that there is a certain set of associations for each phoneme at the level of articulation.…”