Size–sound symbolism revisited

Tsur, Reuven

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.12.002

Cited by 54 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 6 publications

(2 reference statements)

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“…For instance, the association between highfront vowels and smallness (i.e., the mil/mal effect) is seen as arising from an association between some component acoustic or articulatory feature of high-front vowels, and smallness. Phonemes are multidimensional bundles of acoustic and articulatory features, any or all of which may afford an association with particular stimuli (e.g., Tsur, 2006). Indeed, Jakobson and Waugh (1979) opine that Bmost objections to the search for the inner significance of speech sounds arose because the latter were not dissected into their ultimate constituents^(p. 182).…”

Section: Phonetic Features Involved In Sound Symbolismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Or does the involvement of the linguistic system alter the way that these associations operate (in addition to previously mentioned issues of multidimensionality)? Tsur (2006) theorized that linguistic stimuli could be processed based on their phonetic identity, their sensory features, or a combination of the two. It would stand to reason that an overlap between sound symbolic associations and crossmodal correspondences would depend on the stimuli being processed (at least in part) based on their sensory features.…”

Section: Outstanding Issues and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, would one appreciate the sound symbolism of goro without knowing that its definition related to heaviness? Tsur (2006) characterizes sound symbolic associations as Bmeaning potentials^(p. 917) that can be actualized by associating phonemes with meanings in language. As noted by Werner and Kaplan (1963), sounds demonstrate plurisignificance, in that they are able to be associated with multiple different dimensions.…”

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confidence: 99%

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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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Section: Phonetic Features Involved In Sound Symbolismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Outstanding Issues and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

2017

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“…Some were interested in the synaesthetic effects that a few pairs of vowels arouse (Sapir, 1929;Brown, Black, & Horowitz, 1955;Taylor & Taylor, 1962;Kim, 1977;Diffloth, 1994cited in Tsur, 2006Hinton, Nichols & Ohala, 1995;Tsur, 2006), which has been already applied to some practical fields (Parault & Schwanenflugel, 2006;Lowrey & Shrum, 2007;Coulter & Coulter, 2010;Baxter & Lowrey, 2011;Imai, Miyazaki, Yeung, Hidaka, Kantartzis, Okada, & Kita 2015). Some others focus on the prosodic effects on lexical categories that make it easier to distinguish nouns from verbs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Phonetically Similar Korean Words Also Semantically Similar?

Jee¹

2017

Preprint

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In connection with the recent research trend in sound-meaning regularity, this article takes several novel approaches. In an effort to extend the current scope to non-European languages, the study focuses on Korean, including its comparatively new orthography. By choosing 74 Swadesh words as its sample, it not only looks at fundamental aspect of the language, but also facilitates future research to compare various languages. To measure them more precisely, criteria for Korean phonology and orthography were created. For semantic distances, Latent Semantic Analysis was used considering its ability to capture authentic dynamics of language. A significant, negative correlation was found between sounds and meanings as well as orthography and meanings, particularly within the semantic space of younger readers. Distinct sounds to indicate potentially confusing objects are considered to be an adaptive mechanism for children to acquire language. The study also numerically revealed how well Korean orthography represents its sounds.

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“…On the other hand, back low vowels with low F2 and voiced obstruents with lower frequencies tend to denote large objects. The coupling between vowel quality and size is speculated to result from the position of the tongue in the vocal tract (Hinton et al 1994b) or evolutionary pressure to signal size in close contact (Tsur 2006). Another correlate of sound-to-size symbolism is vowel pitch or relative fundamental frequency.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound symbolism in vowels: Vowel quality, duration and pitch in sound-to-size correspondence

Rojczyk

2011

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics

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The study investigates sound symbolism, concentrating on vowel quality, duration, and pitch in sound-to-size correspondences. Thirty-one native speakers of Polish were asked to rate presented stimuli on a 1-7 point scale ranging from "small" to "big". The stimuli consisted of /CVC/ sequences, with all six non-nasalized Polish vowels, blocked in three groups. In the first group, vowel quality was investigated, with duration and pitch unaltered. In the second group, vowel was manipulated to increase its duration by 50% relative to a baseline condition. In the third group, F0 of a vowel was linearly downshifted by a scaling factor of 0.8. The results revealed that neither vowel quality nor lowered pitch significantly influenced size ratings. Vowel duration, however, yielded significantly different ratings compared to a baseline condition. Longer durational values yielded "bigger" measures relative to normal duration. This result is taken as evidence that vowel duration has a relatively more robust effect on perception of size in Polish compared to vowel quality and pitch.

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Size–sound symbolism revisited

Abstract: Why do we perceive bass voices as

Cited by 54 publications

References 6 publications

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

Are Phonetically Similar Korean Words Also Semantically Similar?

Sound symbolism in vowels: Vowel quality, duration and pitch in sound-to-size correspondence

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