Iconicity correlated with vowel harmony in Korean ideophones

Kwon, Nahyun

doi:10.5334/labphon.53

Cited by 23 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…They also found that this distributional pattern is mirrored in the child’s speech: Korean-learning children produced a higher ratio of ideophones (2.73%) than those learning English (1.10%) or Japanese (2.15%). Moreover, as pointed out in Kwon (2018), Korean ideophones are typically produced as fully reduplicated forms. Considering that reduplication facilitates lexical learning (Ota and Skarabela, 2016) as well as early word segmentation (Ota, 2018), Korean mothers’ use of ideophones as reduplicated forms might assist children’s language learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Ideophones in Korean are subject to phonotactic restrictions that are not observed in non-iconic conventional words, in line with the cross-linguistic tendency of iconic words to have characteristic phonological features that distinguish them from ordinary vocabulary. For instance, they are among the restricted subsets of Korean lexicon that exhibit vowel harmony, though the degree to which the harmony pattern is observed varies with the degree of iconicity of the word (Kwon, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Korean Mothers Attune the Frequency and Acoustic Saliency of Sound Symbolic Words to the Linguistic Maturity of Their Children

2018

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The present study investigates Korean mothers’ use of sound symbolism, in particular expressive lengthening and ideophones, in their speech directed to their children. Specifically, we explore whether the frequency and acoustic saliency of sound symbolic words are modulated by the maturity of children’s linguistic ability. A total of 36 infant-mother dyads, 12 each belonging to the three groups of preverbal (M = 8-month-old), early speech (M = 13-month-old), and multiword (M = 27-month-old) stage, were recorded in a 40-min free-play session. The results were consistent with the findings in previous research that the ratio of sound symbolic words in mothers’ speech decreases with child age and that they are acoustically more salient than conventional words in duration and pitch measures. We additionally found that mothers weaken the prominence for ideophones for older children in mean pitch, suggesting that such prominence of these iconic words might bootstrap infants’ word learning especially when they are younger. Interestingly, however, we found that mothers maintain the acoustic saliency of expressive lengthening consistently across children’s ages in all acoustic measures. There is some indication that children at age 2 are not likely to have mastered the fine details of scalar properties in certain words. Thus, it could be that they still benefit from the enhanced prosody of expressive lengthening in learning the semantic attributes of scalar adjectives, and, accordingly, mothers continue to provide redundant acoustic cues longer for expressive lengthening than ideophones.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Korean Mothers Attune the Frequency and Acoustic Saliency of Sound Symbolic Words to the Linguistic Maturity of Their Children

2018

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Hindi has 21 vowel phonemes, but only three of them (/a, i, u/) occur in prototypical ideophones (Kellersmann, 2017). In Korean, ideophones feature steminternal vowel harmony, which does not occur in prosaic words (Kwon, 2018).…”

Section: Phonological and Morphological Integrationmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Other aspects of the formal composition of ideophones also show their markedness. Many ideophones show feature harmony for vowels, tone or nasalisation (Kwon, 2018). Relatedly, ideophones in many languages show nonconcatenative or templatic morphology, with groups of ideophones forming small clusters of similar forms with similar meanings (McCarthy, 1983;McFarland, 2010;Tufvesson, 2011).…”

Section: Markednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideophones (Mimetics, Expressives)

Akita

Dingemanse

2019

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ideophones, also termed mimetics or expressives, are marked words that depict sensory imagery. They are found in many of the world’s languages, and sizable lexical classes of ideophones are particularly well-documented in the languages of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Ideophones are not limited to onomatopoeia like meow and smack but cover a wide range of sensory domains, such as manner of motion (e.g., plisti plasta ‘splish-splash’ in Basque), texture (e.g., tsaklii ‘rough’ in Ewe), and psychological states (e.g., wakuwaku ‘excited’ in Japanese). Across languages, ideophones stand out as marked words due to special phonotactics, expressive morphology including certain types of reduplication, and relative syntactic independence, in addition to production features like prosodic foregrounding and common co-occurrence with iconic gestures. Three intertwined issues have been repeatedly debated in the century-long literature on ideophones. (a) Definition: Isolated descriptive traditions and cross-linguistic variation have sometimes obscured a typologically unified view of ideophones, but recent advances show the promise of a prototype definition of ideophones as conventionalized depictions in speech, with room for language-specific nuances. (b) Integration: The variable integration of ideophones across linguistic levels reveals an interaction between expressiveness and grammatical integration, and has important implications for how to conceive of dependencies between linguistic systems. (c) Iconicity: Ideophones form a natural laboratory for the study of iconic form-meaning associations in natural languages, and converging evidence from corpus and experimental studies suggests important developmental, evolutionary, and communicative advantages of ideophones.

show abstract

“…Identifying deviation from phonotactic norms is important because it speaks to potential imitative affordances which are perhaps necessary for depictive means. The motivation for violating a phonotactic norm is assumed to be depictive or imitative in nature, and indeed phonotactic violations are widely attested for expressive words (Childs 1988;Hinton et al 1994;Ofori 2009;Nasu 2015;Nuckolls et al 2016;Kwon 2018;. We should not eliminate these irregularities from our dataset.…”

Section: 22mentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining iconicity: An articulation-based methodology for explaining the phonological structure of ideophones

Thompson

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as 'sounding like what they mean,' so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog's barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl-(Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning 'light' via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like 'How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?' So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By drawing observations from the visual modality, this paper mediates ambiguity between iconicity and systematicity in spoken language by proposing a methodology which explains how iconicity is achieved through perceptuo-motor analogies derived from oral articulatory gesture. We propose that universal accessibility of articulatory gestures, and human ability to create (perceptuo-motor) analogy, is what in turn makes iconicity universal and thus easily learnable by speakers regardless of language background, as studies have shown. Conversely, our methodology allows one to argue which words are devoid of iconicity seeing as such words should not be explainable in terms of articulatory gesture. We use ideophones from Chaoyang (Southern Min) to illustrate our methodology.

show abstract

Iconicity correlated with vowel harmony in Korean ideophones

Cited by 23 publications

References 22 publications

Korean Mothers Attune the Frequency and Acoustic Saliency of Sound Symbolic Words to the Linguistic Maturity of Their Children

Korean Mothers Attune the Frequency and Acoustic Saliency of Sound Symbolic Words to the Linguistic Maturity of Their Children

Ideophones (Mimetics, Expressives)

Defining iconicity: An articulation-based methodology for explaining the phonological structure of ideophones

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About