Some Physiognomic Aspects of Naming, or, Maluma and Takete Revisited

Abstract

In an effort to understand some of the functional determinants of naming, Koehler's maluma-takete demonstration was examined in two studies, to see whether the matching of the nonsense words and nonsense figures could be accounted for on the basis of physiognomic similarity, as measured by the semantic differential. Matching was found to occur overwhelmingly in the expected direction, and the similarity of semantic differential locations of matched pairs was far greater than that of non-matched pairs. This held strikingly for “literal” scales (such as “Angular-Rounded”) but also held to a lesser extent for clearly “non-literal” scales (such as “Fresh-Stale”), indicating that physiognomic properties over and beyond simple literal description of the stimuli were involved. Study of the semantic differential locations of letters composing the nonsense words, and of ratings of the “fittingness” of the letters as names for the nonsense figures, showed that the physiognomic similarity presumably mediating the naming phenomenon may, at least in the Koehler demonstration, reside in the individual letters rather than in some emergent quality of the whole word. All in all, the study attempted to go beyond just checking whether a “fittingness” phenomenon occurs in naming, by exploring processes hypothesized to underlie the “fittingness.” In at least some cases, physiognomic similarity may be the psychological process mediating naming.

Primate Communication and the Gestural Origin of Language

“…While all these attempts smack of certain 19th-century philological speculation, I do not think we should brush them away as totally meaningless. Research in sound symbolism, closely related to the mouth-gesture hypothesis and now chiefly carried on by psycholinguists, supports the notion that there are some semantic-phonetic universals (Sapir 1929;Taylor and Taylor 1962;Holland and Wertheimer 1964;Weiss 1964Weiss , 1966. High front vowels are associated with smallness, whereas low or back vowels are indicative of flatness or large size.…”

Crossmodal correspondences: A tutorial review

“…The majority of studies in the area of sound symbolism have tended to restrict themselves to detailing the existence of particular crossmodal associations (e.g., Boyle & Tarte, 1980;Holland & Wertheimer, 1964;Lindauer, 1990;Taylor, 1963), checking for the universality of such associations across cultures/languages (e.g., Davis, 1961;Gebels, 1969;Osgood, 1960;Rogers & Ross, 1975;Taylor & Taylor, 1962;see Hinton et al, 1994, for a review), and/or charting their emergence over the course of human development (e.g., Irwin & Newland, 1940;Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006). Interestingly, the latest research suggests that neuropsychological factors may also impact on the expression of crossmodal correspondences: It has, for instance, been reported that children with autism spectrum disorder do not show the bouba/kiki effect (Oberman & Ramachandran, 2008;Ramachandran & Oberman, 2006).…”

Language within our grasp

“…An object or event described gesturally (such as, large object -large gesture of the arms, and small object -tiny opening of the fingers) could now be accompanied by vocalization. If identical sounds were constantly used to indicate identical elements (such as, large object -large opening of the mouth, vowel 'a', and small objecttiny opening of the mouth, vowel 'i'), a primitive vocabulary of meaningful sounds could start to develop 50,51 . An important consequence of this new functional use of vocalization was the necessity of its skillful control.…”