What sound symbolism can and cannot do: Testing the iconicity of ideophones from five languages

Abstract

Sound symbolism is a phenomenon with broad relevance to the study of language and mind, but there has been a disconnect between its investigations in linguistics and psychology. This study tests the sound-symbolic potential of ideophones-words described as iconic-in an experimental task that improves over prior work in terms of ecological validity and experimental control. We presented 203 ideophones from five languages to eighty-two Dutch listeners in a binary-choice task, in four versions: original recording, full diphone resynthesis, segments-only resynthesis, and prosody-only resynthesis. Listeners guessed the meaning of all four versions above chance, confirming the iconicity of ideophones and showing the viability of speech synthesis as a way of controlling for segmental and suprasegmental properties in experimental studies of sound symbolism. The success rate was more modest than prior studies using pseudowords like bouba/kiki, implying that assumptions based on such words cannot simply be transferred to natural languages. Prosody and segments together drive the effect: neither alone is sufficient, showing that segments and prosody work together as cues supporting iconic interpretations. The findings cast doubt on attempts to ascribe iconic meanings to segments alone and support a view of ideophones as words that combine arbitrariness and iconicity. We discuss the implications for theory and methods in the empirical study of sound symbolism and iconicity.*

The Two Meanings of Sound Symbolism

“…African languages and many others use a lot of ideophones, "marked words that depict sensory imagery" (Dingemanse 2012: 655 andcf. Dingemanse 2011;Childs 1994Childs , 2015Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001;Dingemanse et al 2016). Japanese dictionaries list around 4.500 sound symbolic words (Imai & Kita 2014;Oszmiańska 2001).…”

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

“…In addition, some authors have speculated that pairing sounds with congruent meanings in real language may serve to highlight potential associations (e.g., Waugh, 1993). Dingemanse et al (2016) point out that in some cases it is necessary to know the definition of a word in order to appreciate the sound symbolic association between its phonemes and meaning. That is, would one appreciate the sound symbolism of goro without knowing that its definition related to heaviness?…”

Iconicity correlated with vowel harmony in Korean ideophones

“…Being inherently expressive, ideophones provide the best locus to study iconicity (i.e., a perceptual resemblance between form and meaning) in spoken language (Dingemanse et al, 2016;Perry et al, 2015). Recent empirical support for the iconicity of ideophones is found in Dingemanse et al's (2016) study, where native Dutch speakers matched the meanings of existing ideophones (from five ideophone-rich languages that they did not speak) above the chance level of 50%. Cross-linguistically, such (canonically) iconic words often differentiate themselves from ordinary vocabulary by means of skewed phonotactic distributions (Childs, 2014;Dingemanse, 2012;Dingemanse et al, 2015).…”

“…2 The twofold onomatopoeic/cross-modal distinction is based on the traditional semantic categorization of the Korean ideophonic lexicon, i.e., ɨjsəŋə 'phonomimes' for depiction of auditory experiences and ɨjtɛə 'phenomimes plus psychomimes' for depiction of non-auditory experiences, such as visual or tactile sensations or psychological states. A more fine-grained level of distinction is possible, for example, by subdividing cross-modal domains into motion, texture, shape, and visual appearance, as in Dingemanse et al (2016). However, the principal aim of this paper is to examine whether ideophones of the highest iconicity display the greatest diversity in the regular phonotactic of the ideophonic system.…”

“…To do so effectively requires taking whatever phonological and phonotactic liberties are needed. This predicts that (a) onomatopoeic ideophones will show great diversity in harmony patterns and, in contrast, (b) cross-modal ideophones that capture sensory imagery by using more abstract iconic mappings (Dingemanse et al, 2016) will have more 'room' to conform to vowel harmony. To test these hypotheses, the distribution of harmony patterns in onomatopoeic vs. cross-modal ideophones was examined, using a written corpus of Korean ideophonic stems.…”