A wug-shaped curve in sound symbolism: the case of Japanese Pokémon names

Abstract

An experiment showed that Japanese speakers’ judgement of Pokémons’ evolution status on the basis of nonce names is affected both by mora count and by the presence of a voiced obstruent. The effects of mora count are a case of counting cumulativity, and the interaction between the two factors a case of ganging-up cumulativity. Together, the patterns result in what Hayes (2020) calls ‘wug-shaped curves’, a quantitative signature predicted by MaxEnt. I show in this paper that the experimental results can indeed be successfully modelled with MaxEnt, and also that Stochastic Optimality Theory faces an interesting set of challenges. The study was inspired by a proposal made within formal phonology, and reveals important previously understudied aspects of sound symbolism. In addition, it demonstrates how cumulativity is manifested in linguistic patterns. The work here shows that formal phonology and research on sound symbolism can be mutually beneficial.

Exploring the nature of cumulativity in sound symbolism: Experimental studies of Pokémonastics with English speakers

“…Experiment 2 demonstrated that counting and ganging-up cumulativity simultaneously obtain in the domain of sound symbolism (Kawahara, 2020d;Kawahara, Suzuki, & Kumagai, 2020), paralleling recent findings from other areas of probabilistic phonological patterns (Breiss, 2020;Hayes, 2020;McPherson & Hayes, 2016;Zuraw & Hayes, 2017).…”

“…Recent experiments by Kawahara and Kumagai (in press) build upon these observations and show that two voiced obstruents evoke stronger sound symbolic images than one voiced obstruent in Japanese. Kawahara (2020d) studied how name lengths, measured in terms of mora counts, affect the judgment of Pokémons evolvedness (see Section 1.4 below for further details) and showed that each mora count increased the probability of nonce names being judged as evolved Pokémon characters. Kawahara, Suzuki, and Kumagai (2020) demonstrated a similar effect of mora counts on judged attack values in Pokémon move names.…”

“…Ahlner and Zlatev (2010) likewise argue for the ganging-up cumulative pattern using the bouba-kiki paradigm with Swedish speakers, although their results are not very clear because of a ceiling effect (Kawahara, 2020a). Kawahara, Suzuki, and Kumagai (2020) and Kawahara (2020d) showed that in addition to the effects of name length, the presence of a voiced obstruent also plays a role in the judgment of Pokémons names, suggesting that counting cumulativity and ganging-up cumulativity can coexist within a single sound symbolic pattern. See Kawahara (2020a) for a few other potential cases of cumulative patterns in sound symbolism.…”

“…The second question is also under-explored in the context of sound symbolism in particular, and in other domains of linguistic patterns in general. The only studies which addressed this question in the context of sound symbolism are Kawahara, Suzuki, and Kumagai (2020) and Kawahara (2020d), whose experiments show that counting cumulativity (the effect of name length) and gang-up cumulativity (the additive effects of name length and voiced obstruents) hold in the same sound symbolic pattern of Pokémon names in Japanese. In the regression-based model, the natural prediction is that if we manipulate the relevant factors in a certain way, both counting cumulativity and ganging-up cumulativity will show up together within a single pattern, again contrasting with the fast-and-frugal model, which predicts neither type of cumulative patterns.…”

Phonetic bases of sound symbolism: A review

“…Alderete and Kochetov (2017) andKawahara (2020b) adduce additional reasons why studying sound symbolism can be interesting and important for formal phonologists.4 One related question which I do not delve into in this paper due to space limitation is the issue of universality of sound symbolism. To the extent that sound symbolism is grounded in phonetic properties, and to the extent that speakers of different languages share the same articulators and communicate under comparable physical settings, it would not be surprising if sound symbolic associations are observed universally across languages.…”