How Sound Symbolism Is Processed in the Brain: A Study on Japanese Mimetic Words

Abstract

Sound symbolism is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between word and meaning. Although a number of behavioral studies demonstrate that both children and adults are universally sensitive to sound symbolism in mimetic words, the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not yet been extensively investigated. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how Japanese mimetic words are processed in the brain. In Experiment 1, we compared processing for motion mimetic words with that for non-sound symbolic motion verbs and adverbs. Mimetic words uniquely activated the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). In Experiment 2, we further examined the generalizability of the findings from Experiment 1 by testing another domain: shape mimetics. Our results show that the right posterior STS was active when subjects processed both motion and shape mimetic words, thus suggesting that this area may be the primary structure for processing sound symbolism. Increased activity in the right posterior STS may also reflect how sound symbolic words function as both linguistic and non-linguistic iconic symbols.

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

“…Although they are rare in Indo-European languages, they are common in many others, including sub-Saharan African languages, Australia Aboriginal languages, Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian languages, South America indigenous languages, and Balto-Finnic languages (Perniss et al, 2010). Additionally, speaking to the psychological reality of ideophones, studies have shown that there are both behavioral (e.g., Imai et al, 2008;) and neural differences (e.g., Kanero et al, 2014;Lockwood & Tuomainen, 2015) in the learning and processing of ideophones as compared to nonideophonic words (or ideophones paired with incorrect meanings).…”

“…An example of this could be when a word denoting something small contains phonemes that are sound symbolically associated with smallness (i.e., an instance of indirect iconicity, discussed later). These congruencies can have effects on language learning (e.g., Asano et al, 2015;Imai, Kita, Nagumo, & Okada, 2008;Perry, Perlman, & Lupyan, 2015; for a review, see Imai & Kita, 2014) and processing (e.g., Kanero, Imai, Okuda, Okada, & Matsuda, 2014;Lockwood & Tuomainen, 2015;Sučević, Savić, Popović, Styles, & Ković, 2015). Moreover, sound symbolic associations have also been shown to impact cognition more broadly, including effects on action (Parise & Pavani, 2011;Rabaglia, Maglio, Krehm, Seok, & Trope, 2016;Vainio, Schulman, Tiippana, & Vainio, 2013;Vainio, Tiainen, Tiippana, Rantala, & Vainio, 2016), memory (Lockwood, Hargoort, & Dingemanse, 2016;Nygaard, Cook, & Namy, 2009;Preziosi & Coane, 2017), and categorization (Ković, Plunkett, & Westermann, 2010;Lupyan & Casasanto, 2015; for a recent review of sound symbolism effects, see Lockwood & Dingemanse, 2015).…”

Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution

“…bouba and kiki judged to correspond to a round, curvy versus jagged, pointy shape, respectively [20][21][22]. Iconic mappings have also been shown to be facilitatory in studies using indirect measures of online processing, including reaction times [23,24] and EEG waveforms [25,26], as well as to facilitate language acquisition in both children and adults [27,28]. Finally, prosody, or the suprasegmental modulation of the acoustic signal, constitutes another channel of expression in which iconic mappings may be expressed.…”

Comprehension of mimetics by adult native speakers of Japanese

“…Indeed, study of sound-symbolism not only is interesting per se, but also has provided insight into first language acquisition (where it has been proposed to play several powerful roles -see Imai and Kita, 2014, for more on this), and could potentially provide insight into such areas as language evolution (ibidem, and see also Frellesvig, 2010, Chapter 17, for the case of Japanese in particular) and auditory phonetics (e.g., Kanero et al, 2014, found that at least some Japanese mimetics are processed in different areas of the brain than non-sound-symbolic words).…”