On the Universal Character of Phonetic Symbolism With Special Reference to Vowels

Fischer‐Jørgensen, Eli

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9582.1978.tb00329.x

Cited by 28 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…We found that the difference between the sound stimuli was in terms of vowel quality rather than general features of the speech, such as amplitude or pitch. This was reflected in the higher pitch of F2 in the high/front vowels, which has previously been identified as a potential soundsymbolic property of speech with respect to indicating size (Fischer-j0rgensen, 1978;Ohala, 1994) and relates to differences in front or back position of the tongue.…”

Section: Experiments 2: Sound Symbolism In Vowels and Word Learning Mementioning

confidence: 96%

The role of sound symbolism in language learning.

Monaghan

Mattock

Walker

2012

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

125

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Certain correspondences between the sound and meaning of words can be observed in subsets of the vocabulary. These sound-symbolic relationships have been suggested to result in easier language acquisition, but previous studies have explicitly tested effects of sound symbolism on learning category distinctions but not on word learning. In 2 word learning experiments, we varied the extent to which phonological properties related to a rounded-angular shape distinction and we distinguished learning of categories from learning of individual words. We found that sound symbolism resulted in an advantage for learning categories of sound-shape mappings but did not assist in learning individual word meanings. These results are consistent with the limited presence of sound symbolism in natural language. The results also provide a reinterpretation of the role of sound symbolism in language learning and language origins and a greater specification of the conditions under which sound symbolism proves advantageous for learning.

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Section: Experiments 2: Sound Symbolism In Vowels and Word Learning Mementioning

confidence: 96%

The role of sound symbolism in language learning.

Monaghan

Mattock

Walker

2012

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

125

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…She showed that analysing ideophones as iconic helped explain apparent irregularities in their synchronic and diachronic behaviour, for instance their resistance to processes of regular sound change. In a study of the intonational system of English, Liberman (1975) adopted Diffloth's distinction between "ideophonic and morphemic modes of lexical structure", 5 That ideophones could be described as "exotic phenomena" and as "pervading the world's languages with regularity" in one sentence is a perfect illustration of the viewpoint dependence of notions of marginality (Dingemanse 2017 Mester & Itô (1989) nonconcatenative morphology McCarthy (1983), McNally (1991 aesthetic and expressive functions of language Samarin (1970a), Jakobson and Waugh (1979) lexical discreteness and the nature of words Diffloth (1976), Mithun (1982) gradience and iconicity in prosody Liberman (1975), Bolinger (1985) psychological reality of lexical iconicity Fischer-Jørgensen (1978), Fordyce (1988) expressive vs. prosaic levels of structure Diffloth (1980), Zwicky & Pullum (1987) with the former being iconic and the latter arbitrary. Liberman used this distinction in the service of an analysis of intonation as similarly two-faced, with iconic and arbitrary aspects.…”

Section: Impact In General Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Around the same time, scholars began to start experimental testing of the iconic associations found in ideophones. Fischer-Jørgensen (1978) put some of Westermann's proposals to the test in a forced choice task with 99 Danish students. The students were presented with his "dark" and "light" vowel groups and had to match Danish adjective pairs to them.…”

Section: Impact In General Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

Dingemanse

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Ideophones (also known as expressives or mimetics, and including onomatopoeia) have been systematically studied in linguistics since the 1850s, when they were first described as a lexical class of vivid sensory words in West-African languages. This paper surveys the research history of ideophones, from its roots in African linguistics to its fruits in general linguistics and typology around the globe. It shows that despite a recurrent narrative of marginalisation, work on ideophones has made an impact in many areas of linguistics, from theories of phonological features to typologies of manner and motion, and from sound symbolism to sensory language. Due to their hybrid nature as gradient vocal gestures that grow roots in discrete linguistic systems, ideophones provide opportunities to reframe typological questions, reconsider the role of language ideology in linguistic scholarship, and rethink the margins of language. With ideophones increasingly being brought into the fold of the language sciences, this review synthesises past theoretical insights and empirical findings in order to enable future work to build on them.

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“…While there are a number of proposals, there is a scarcity of experimental work focused on adjudicating between them. One potential reason for this is that the mechanisms have yet to be thoroughly described and evaluated in a single work (though see Deroy & Auvray, 2013;Fischer-Jørgensen, 1978;French, 1977;Johansson & Zlatev, 2013;Masuda, 2007;Nuckolls, 1999;Shinohara & Kawahara, 2010); that is the aim of the present article. We begin by describing two well-known instances of sound symbolism to serve as reference points.…”

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confidence: 99%

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

2017

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Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (e.g., objects of a certain size or shape). Some of the best-known examples include the mil/mal effect (Sapir, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239, 1929) and the maluma/takete effect (Köhler, 1929). Interest in this topic has been on the rise within psychology, and studies have demonstrated that sound symbolic effects are relevant for many facets of cognition, including language, action, memory, and categorization. Sound symbolism also provides a mechanism by which words' forms can have nonarbitrary, iconic relationships with their meanings. Although various proposals have been put forth for how phonetic features (both acoustic and articulatory) come to be associated with stimuli, there is as yet no generally agreed-upon explanation. We review five proposals: statistical co-occurrence between phonetic features and associated stimuli in the environment, a shared property among phonetic features and stimuli; neural factors; species-general, evolved associations; and patterns extracted from language. We identify a number of outstanding questions that need to be addressed on this topic and suggest next steps for the field.

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On the Universal Character of Phonetic Symbolism With Special Reference to Vowels

Cited by 28 publications

References 11 publications

The role of sound symbolism in language learning.

The role of sound symbolism in language learning.

Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

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