Sound symbolism in sighted and blind. The role of vision and orthography in sound-shape correspondences

Abstract

Non-arbitrary sound-shape correspondences (SSC), such as the "bouba-kiki" effect, have been consistently observed across languages and together with other sound-symbolic phenomena challenge the classic linguistic dictum of the arbitrariness of the sign. Yet, it is unclear what makes a sound "round" or "spiky" to the human mind. Here we tested the hypothesis that visual experience is necessary for the emergence of SSC, supported by empirical evidence showing reduced SSC in visually impaired people. Results of two experiments comparing early blind and sighted individuals showed that SSC emerged strongly in both groups. Experiment 2, however, showed a partially different pattern of SSC in sighted and blind, that was mostly explained by a different effect of orthographic letter shape: The shape of written letters (spontaneously activated by spoken words) influenced SSC in the sighted, but not in the blind, who are exposed to an orthography (Braille) in which letters do not have spiky or round outlines. In sum, early blindness does not prevent the emergence of SSC, and differences between sighted and visually impaired people may be due the indirect influence (or lack thereof) of orthographic letter shape.

The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems

“…Chinese speakers use Roman letters (Pinyin) when interacting with computers. From this perspective, then, it is important to see our results alongside the fact that the bouba/kiki effect has also been found in congenitally blind individuals [ 73 ], in at least some studies of pre-literate children [ 51 , 77 , 79 ], as well as in some cultures that do not use written language [ 37 ]. Taken together, this evidence converges to indicate that bouba/kiki exists, to a substantial extent, independently of orthography, and thus, appears to be rooted in crossmodal correspondence between the spoken words and visual shapes.…”

“…While orthography can clearly play a role in the bouba/kiki phenomenon, evidence from studies with different populations suggests that there is also some genuinely vocal basis for the effect. For example, early blind individuals who have no experience with the Roman alphabet show the effect when feeling round and pointy shapes [73], although earlier investigations failed to establish this [74]. While a few studies have failed to find the bouba/kiki effect with pre-literate children [75,76], several others have shown the effect in children, including pre-literate ones [51,[77][78][79].…”

Does the name say it all? Investigating phoneme-personality sound symbolism in first names.

“…In general, certain sonorant consonants (/m/, /n/ and /l/; see Table 1 for definitions of linguistic terms), voiced stop consonants (/b/, /d/ and /g/, though to a lesser extent; cf. Bottini, Barilari, & Collignon, 2019), and back rounded vowels (e.g., /u/ as in who’d , and /oʊ/ as in hoed ) show an association with round shapes; while voiceless stop consonants (e.g., /p/, /t/ and /k/), and high-front unrounded vowels (e.g., /i/ as in heed ) show an association with sharp shapes (e.g., D’Onofrio, 2014; McCormick, Kim, List, & Nygaard, 2015; Nielsen & Rendall, 2011). The maluma/takete effect is not the only example of sound symbolism.…”

The Effects of Mandarin Chinese Lexical Tones in Sound–Shape and Sound–Size Correspondences

“…An extensive body of studies have investigated the phonetic and acoustic features that drive crossmodal correspondences (e.g., Aryani et al, 2018;Auracher, 2017;Bottini et al, 2019;Knoeferle et al, 2017;Margiotoudi and Pulvermüller, 2020;Rendall, 2011, 2013;Parise et al, 2014;Spector and Maurer, 2013;Westbury et al, 2018); however, little is known about the role of lexical tones. Approximately 60%-70% of world languages employ lexical tones (Yip, 2002), and the forms of lexical tones vary widely among tonal languages (see Best, 2019 for a review).…”