Sound Symbolism in Foreign Language Phonological Acquisition

Abstract

<jats:title>Sound Symbolism in Foreign Language Phonological Acquisition</jats:title> <jats:p>The paper aims at investigating the idea of a symbolic nature of sounds and its implications for in the acquisition of foreign language phonology. Firstly, it will present an overview of universal trends in phonetic symbolism, i.e. non-arbitrary representations of a phoneme by specific semantic criteria. Secondly, the results of a preliminary study on different manifestations of sound symbolism including emotionally-loaded representations of phonemes and other synaesthetic associations shall be discussed. Finally, practical pedagogical implications of sound symbolism will be explored and a number of innovative classroom activities involving sound symbolic associations will be presented.</jats:p>

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

“…Sequences with lengthened vowels were judged as "bigger" compared to sequences with unlengthened vowels. This effect was previously observed in a study with Polish listeners rating English vowels (Wrembel 2010). In our results, the effect was the most intense for the back vowels /o/ and /u/.…”

“…Many species try to use this coupling between pitch and size to deceive potential adversaries (Morton 1994). Finally, vowel duration has been shown to be patterned with perceived size, in that longer vowels are associated with "big" rather than "small" (Wrembel 2010). In this study, 59 Polish learners of English rated English isolated vowels using different meaning measures on a 7-point scale.…”

Perception of sound symbolism in mimetic stimuli: The voicing contrast in Japanese and English

“…In order to maximize the voicing effect on sound symbolism, only one vowel /e/ was used in the stimulus words. According to Hamano (1998), Wrembel (2010), and Shinohara & Kawahara (to appear), the height and the frontness of Japanese vowels influence how the sound is perceived. Among the Japanese vowels /i, a, e, o, u/, only the vowel /e/ is neither extremely high or low nor front or back.…”

Verifying a holistic multimodal approach to pronunciation training of intermediate Polish learners of English

“…Celce-Murcia et al 1996, Wrembel 2010 caters for the needs of students with different learning modalities (auditory, visual, tactile and kinesthetic) and complements other types of instruction. It activates various channels of perception in the course of holistic phonetic training and integrates auditory, visual, tactile and kinesthetic learning by employing different kinds of multisensory reinforcement.…”