Perceptual Dimensions of Vowels

Abstract

The author has asked subjects without phonetic training to group vowels according to given dimensions, to place vowels on a seven point scale according to given dimensions, and to match vowels with colours. The result is a clear and consistent grouping of vowels according to brightness (corresponding to bright and dark colours and to different hues of varying specific brightness), whereas no auditorydimension corresponding to saturation could be found. The placement of six vowels on 14 seven point scales with the poles bright-dark, light-heavy etc. and of twelve vowels on 3 selected scales yielded four different results, which may be assumed to represent four different factors, of which No. 1 corresponds mainly (but not completely) to the acoustic F 2 -dimension, No. 3 mainly (but not completely) to the acoustic Fj-dimension, whereas No. 2 is in between, representing a dominating dimension, with which the others sometimes fuse. A fourth dimension corresponding to rounding has not been sufficiently investigated. The vowels i y u are considered to be compact compared to ε ce ο as diffuse. The terminology used in the distinctive feature analysis is thus not very adequate when applied to perceptual dimensions.Comparisons based on similarity and dissimilarity have been started. An attempt to disentangle the auditory, motoric and phonemic contributions to the perceptual dimensions would be desirable.It is now generally accepted that speech sounds should not only be described in articulatory and in acoustic, but also in perceptual, terms. This, to a large extent, is the merit of ROMAN JAKOBSON, who as early as 1941 1 emphasized the importance of the perceptual level, realizing that it is primarily on this level we must seek for valid explanations of (1) the general laws for the structure of phonemic systems, (2) the general tendencies of sound development, (3) the facts of sound symbolism. This is largely a question of feature analysis, and the main question must therefore be: what are the basic dimensions by which speech sounds can be analysed into a limited number of phonetic features explaining the above-mentioned general tendencies? These dimensions can hardly be acoustic, since acoustic facts do not explain anything except under the implicit assumption that they have exact perceptual correlates (and this is by no means certain; on the contrary, we know that for pure tones this is not the case). Articulatory dimensions might be of more interest, but, here again, under the assumption that our classification of peripheral articulatory facts reflects the organisation 1 ROMAN JAKOBSON, "Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze' '

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

“…Indeed there is some evidence for this. Fischer-Jørgensen (1968) found that Danish-speaking participants rated several pairs of allophones (e.g., [oe] and [ɑ], allophones of /ae/, as in had), differently on semantic differential scales. While allophones belong to the same phoneme category, they have different sensory features.…”

Contiguity-based sound iconicity: The meaning of words resonates with phonetic properties of their immediate verbal contexts

“…There is also evidence that these relations between sound frequency and physical and social dominance may have been adopted in sound-iconic associations with vowels. Fischer-Jørgensen [102], for example, found that the relative formant dispersion of vowels corresponds to how these vowels are assessed on a variety of scales, such as dark–bright, hard–soft, or small–big. In a more recent study [26], participants showed a significant tendency to implicitly associate front vowels with fearful body postures and back vowels with angry and aggressive behavior.…”

Phonemes as images

“…Most of the experimental literature on "synaesthetic sound symbolism" (Hinton et al 1994: 4) shows that people tend to establish analogies between phonological and visual distinctions. A strong connection has been found for example between the [front : back] articulatory opposition in vowels (that is an F2 [acute : grave] acoustic opposition) and such visual pairs as "bright" vs "dark" (Newman 1933, Fischer-Jørgensen 1967, Peterfalvi 1970, Marks 1982and 1989 and "small" vs "large" (Newman 1933, Johnson 1967, Klank et al 1971, Thompson and Estes 2011. Among consonants, associations have been established particularly between the [voiceless : voiced] articulatory opposition (which is an [acute : grave] acoustic opposition) and the visual pairs "bright" vs "dark" (Newman 1933, Peterfalvi 1970, "sharp" vs "rounded" (Fox 1935, Davis 1961, Holland and Wertheimer 1964, Westbury 2005 and "small" vs "large" (Taylor andTaylor 1962, Lapolla 1994; Thompson and Estes 2011).…”