The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies

Brand, James; Monaghan, Padraic; Walker, Peter

doi:10.1111/cogs.12565

Cited by 10 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Consistent with that hypothesis, corpus analyses have demonstrated that the first words acquired by children display more non-arbitrariness than later acquired words [155,146,156], suggesting that non-arbitrariness plays a crucial role in early language acquisition. Experimental studies have also contributed to the evidence that non-arbitrariness benefits learning: Non-arbitrariness helps to bootstrap the acquisition of individual words at the onset of vocabulary development [157] and, as the vocabulary grows, aids learning broad categorical distinctions such as nouns vs. verbs, and supports categorical generalization to novel words [158,159,157].…”

Section: Learnability Beyond Compositionality: Iconicity and Systematicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

Gibson

Futrell

Piantadosi

et al. 2019

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

288

196

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we review studies that deploy formal tools from probability and information theory to understand how and why language works the way that it does, focusing on phenomena ranging from the lexicon through syntax. These studies show how a pervasive pressure for efficiency guides the forms of natural language and indicate that a rich future for language research lies in connecting linguistics to cognitive psychology and mathematical theories of communication and inference.

show abstract

Section: Learnability Beyond Compositionality: Iconicity and Systematicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

Gibson

Futrell

Piantadosi

et al. 2019

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

288

196

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The findings from Gasser (2004) also indicate that the advantage of determining the specific meanings of words using sound symbolism is diminished as the vocabulary increases (although see Revill et al, 2018). Whether sound symbolism facilitates learning categories or specific word meanings in adults, the idea that sound symbolism can benefit adult learners has been recently validated with eye-tracking and other behavioral studies (Brand et al, 2018;Revill et al, 2018).…”

Section: Sound Symbolism In Language Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, individuals exhibit sensitivity to sound-symbolic crossmodal associations as early as four months of age (Ozturk et al, 2013), and recent studies have suggested that sound symbolism is important for specific word-to-meaning associations in young children with limited vocabularies (Gasser, 2004;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2017). In adults, sound symbolism may offer linguistic processing advantages for categorization and word learning, particularly for larger vocabularies (Brand et al, 2018;Gasser, 2004;Revill et al, 2018). Though most of the evidence supporting sound symbolism has consisted of behavioral studies, more recently neuroimaging studies have begun to reveal the neural correlates of this phenomenon (Revill et al, 2014;McCormick et al, 2018;Peiffer-Smadja & Cohen, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…the spectrotemporal features and amplitude variations of speech sounds and the spatial features of shapes) have received limited examination. In tasks that test artificial language learning, non-arbitrary word-meaning associations are easier to learn than arbitrarily constructed word-meaning associations (Brand et al, 2018;Nielsen, 2016;Revill et al, 2018), but researchers do not know what stimulus features participants attend to during the perception of these artificial words. Assessing the physical features that contribute to a sound-symbolic CC, as we do here, provides insight into the fundamental perceptual processes that drive word-tomeaning associations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Acoustic and Visual Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondences

Sm¹,

McCormick²,

Lacey

et al. 2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is often assumed that a fundamental property of language is the arbitrariness of the relationship between sound and meaning. Sound symbolism, which refers to non-arbitrary mapping between the sound of a word and its meaning, contradicts this assumption. Sensitivity to sound symbolism has been studied through crossmodal correspondences (CCs) between auditory pseudowords (e.g. 'loh-moh') and visual shapes (e.g. a blob). We used representational similarity analysis to examine the relationships between physical stimulus parameters and perceptual ratings that varied on dimensions of roundedness and pointedness, for a range of auditory pseudowords and visual shapes. We found that perceptual ratings of these stimuli relate to certain physical features of both the visual and auditory domains. Representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of parameters that capture the spatial profile of the visual shapes, such as the simple matching coefficient and Jaccard distance, were significantly correlated with those of the visual ratings. RDMs of certain acoustic parameters of the pseudowords, such as the temporal fast Fourier transform (FFT) and spectral tilt, that reflect spectral composition, as well as shimmer and speech envelope that reflect aspects of amplitude variation over time, were significantly correlated with those of the auditory perceptual ratings. RDMs of the temporal FFT (acoustic) and the simple matching coefficient (visual) were significantly correlated. These findings suggest that sound-symbolic CCs are related to basic properties of auditory and visual stimuli, and thus provide insights into the fundamental nature of sound symbolism and how this might evoke specific impressions of physical meaning in natural language.

show abstract

“…For example, children of pre-reading age exhibit sensitivity to sound-symbolic crossmodal associations (Imai et al, 2015;Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006;Ozturk, Krehm, & Vouloumanos, 2013), and recent studies have suggested that sound symbolism is important for specific word-tomeaning associations in young children with limited vocabularies (Gasser, 2004;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2017). In adults, sound symbolism may offer linguistic processing advantages for categorization and word learning (Brand, Monaghan, & Walker, 2018;Gasser, 2004;Revill, Namy, & Nygaard, 2018), and for rehabilitation of patients with aphasia (Meteyard, Stoppard, Snudden, Cappa, & Vigliocco, 2015). More recently, neuroimaging studies have begun to reveal the neural correlates of sound symbolism (McCormick, Lacey, Stilla, Nygaard, & Sathian, 2018;Peiffer-Smadja & Cohen, 2019;Revill et al, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound‐Symbolic Mapping of Auditory Pseudowords to Visual Shapes

Lacey¹,

Jamal

List³

et al. 2020

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sound symbolism refers to non‐arbitrary mappings between the sounds of words and their meanings and is often studied by pairing auditory pseudowords such as “maluma” and “takete” with rounded and pointed visual shapes, respectively. However, it is unclear what auditory properties of pseudowords contribute to their perception as rounded or pointed. Here, we compared perceptual ratings of the roundedness/pointedness of large sets of pseudowords and shapes to their acoustic and visual properties using a novel application of representational similarity analysis (RSA). Representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of the auditory and visual ratings of roundedness/pointedness were significantly correlated crossmodally. The auditory perceptual RDM correlated significantly with RDMs of spectral tilt, the temporal fast Fourier transform (FFT), and the speech envelope. Conventional correlational analyses showed that ratings of pseudowords transitioned from rounded to pointed as vocal roughness (as measured by the harmonics‐to‐noise ratio, pulse number, fraction of unvoiced frames, mean autocorrelation, shimmer, and jitter) increased. The visual perceptual RDM correlated significantly with RDMs of global indices of visual shape (the simple matching coefficient, image silhouette, image outlines, and Jaccard distance). Crossmodally, the RDMs of the auditory spectral parameters correlated weakly but significantly with those of the global indices of visual shape. Our work establishes the utility of RSA for analysis of large stimulus sets and offers novel insights into the stimulus parameters underlying sound symbolism, showing that sound‐to‐shape mapping is driven by acoustic properties of pseudowords and suggesting audiovisual cross‐modal correspondence as a basis for language users' sensitivity to this type of sound symbolism.

show abstract

The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies

Cited by 10 publications

References 33 publications

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

Acoustic and Visual Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondences

Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound‐Symbolic Mapping of Auditory Pseudowords to Visual Shapes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About