Is a boat bigger than a ship? Null results in the investigation of vowel sound symbolism on size judgments in real language

Sound symbolism is the phenomenon by which certain kinds of phonemes are associated with perceptual and/or semantic properties. In this paper we explored size sound symbolism (i.e., the mil/mal effect) in which high-front vowels (e.g., /i/) show an association with smallness, while low-back vowels (e.g., /ɑ/) show an association with largeness. This has previously been demonstrated with nonwords, but its impact on the processing of real language is unknown. We investigated this using a size judgment task, in which participants classified words for small or large objects, containing a small- or large-associated vowel, based on their size. Words were presented auditorily in Experiment 1 and visually in Experiment 2. We did not observe an effect of vowel congruence (i.e., between object size and the size association of its vowel) in either of the experiments. This suggests that there are limits to the impact of sound symbolism on the processing of real language.

Sound symbolism in Chinese children’s literature

Iconicity is a fundamental property of spoken and signed languages. However, quantitative analysis of sound-meaning association in Chinese has not been extensively developed, and little is known about the impact of sound symbolism in children’s literature. As sound symbolism is supposed to be a universal cognitive phenomenon, this research seeks to investigate whether iconic structures of Mandarin are embodied in native Chinese speakers’ language experience. The paper describes a case study of Chinese storybooks with the goal of testing whether phonosemantic association is prominent between name sounds and character features. A quantitative method was used to investigate the distribution of different phonological units in character denomination depending on their physical and emotional traits. The results show that phonemes and syllable combination patterns are closely related to perceivable character features. By comparing schematic mapping in Chinese with other languages, the study illuminates a cross-linguistic tendency in addition to a Chinese-specific iconic relation between sound and meaning.

Rethinking the frequency code: a meta-analytic review of the role of acoustic body size in communicative phenomena

The widely cited frequency code hypothesis attempts to explain a diverse range of communicative phenomena through the acoustic projection of body size. The set of phenomena includes size sound symbolism (using /i/ to signal smallness in words such as teeny ), intonational phonology (using rising contours to signal questions) and the indexing of social relations via vocal modulation, such as lowering one's voice pitch to signal dominance. Among other things, the frequency code is commonly interpreted to suggest that polite speech should be universally signalled via high pitch owing to the association of high pitch with small size and submissiveness. We present a cross-cultural meta-analysis of polite speech of 101 speakers from seven different languages. While we find evidence for cross-cultural variation, voice pitch is on average lower when speakers speak politely, contrary to what the frequency code predicts. We interpret our findings in the light of the fact that pitch has a multiplicity of possible communicative meanings. Cultural and contextual variation determines which specific meanings become manifest in a specific interactional context. We use the evidence from our meta-analysis to propose an updated view of the frequency code hypothesis that is based on the existence of many-to-many mappings between speech acoustics and communicative interpretations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.

THE RETROSPECTIVE OF THE PHONOSEMANTISM FORMATION AND PHONOSEMANTIC REALITIES IN ENGLISH

The scientific search for phonosemantic realities, carried out in modern promising areas of linguistic research, contributes to the determination of language cognitive capabilities. In the study of language, linguists actively use new principles, which require integration from different sciences to understand language carrier and diverse aspects of the human thinking process, to extensively analyse a wide range of language functions, and to profoundly explain linguistic phenomena. Phonosemantics is now a certain linguistic branch of psycholinguistics, which has gone through several stages of its formation. In practice, its foundation and principles have become the cornerstone of linguistic reasoned searches for the connection between sound and meaning in a multi-genre discourse. There are two approaches to the study of phonosemantism. Researchers' experiments confirm the existence of primary or elementary phonosemantism, showing the dependence of symbolic meaning on the acoustic-articulatory characteristics of sound. Secondary sound-symbolism arises as a result of the speaker's desire to reveal the correlation between the sonority of a word, develops in accordance with the phonetic laws of a particular language and its meaning. Both points of view need to be analyzed only in conjunction, since secondary, or contextually, phonosymbolism is possible due to the existence of the so-called primary, or elementary phonosymbolism. This phenomenon is due to the ability of the human brain to establish an associative relationship between sound and meaning, between objectivity and polymodality of human perception. Experiments have shown that the subject image is polymodal. The polymodal nature of object perception, in turn, presupposes the emergence of auditory images based on the action of only visual stimuli, and vice versa: visual images are born on the basis of auditory stimuli. The results of this study are well-argued evidence of the constancy of the associative meanings of the phonemes of the modern English language.

Sound-Action Symbolism

Recent evidence has shown linkages between actions and segmental elements of speech. For instance, close-front vowels are sound symbolically associated with the precision grip, and front vowels are associated with forward-directed limb movements. The current review article presents a variety of such sound-action effects and proposes that they compose a category of sound symbolism that is based on grounding a conceptual knowledge of a referent in articulatory and manual action representations. In addition, the article proposes that even some widely known sound symbolism phenomena such as the sound-magnitude symbolism can be partially based on similar sensorimotor grounding. It is also discussed that meaning of suprasegmental speech elements in many instances is similarly grounded in body actions. Sound symbolism, prosody, and body gestures might originate from the same embodied mechanisms that enable a vivid and iconic expression of a meaning of a referent to the recipient.

Featural-visual Indexicality and Sound-shape Congruency in a Phonologically Engineered Alphabet

The term uniskript was coined to refer to a class of phonologically engineered alphabets that employ visual-featural indexicality combined with sound-shape congruency to represent speech. In this working paper, I introduce the uniskript methodology, an alphabet generator technique that uses indices instead of symbols to represent the flow of speech. I refer to the Peircean theory of signs to explain the crucial semiotic distinction between uniskript and the traditional alphabets: in uniskript, an icon resembling relevant articulatory features of a given phoneme is used to index sound to shape. I also indicate how the findings in sound-symbolism were incorporated into the indices to facilitate cross-modal correspondences. I propose that uniskript indexical nature and sensorial mappings can explain why it is so much easier to learn than symbolic and sensory incongruent alphabets. I then briefly discuss how the study of uniskript alphabets can shed some light on the role of cross-modal correspondences in learning. It can also bring a deeper understanding of the role of phonology in sound symbolism. Finally, I refer to some applications of uniskript in the teaching of literacy and in remediating reading issues and illustrate the entire concept by introducing a uniskript alphabet developed as a tool to teach pronunciation in an ESL program. keywords: uniskript, alphabets, sound symbolism, sound-shape iconicity, cross-modal congruency, phonology, second language learning, pronunciation in L2

Neural Basis of the Sound-Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondence Between Auditory Pseudowords and Visual Shapes

Sound symbolism refers to the association between the sounds of words and their meanings, often studied using the crossmodal correspondence between auditory pseudowords, e.g., ‘takete’ or ‘maluma’, and pointed or rounded visual shapes, respectively. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, participants were presented with pseudoword–shape pairs that were sound-symbolically congruent or incongruent. We found no significant congruency effects in the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal when participants were attending to visual shapes. During attention to auditory pseudowords, however, we observed greater BOLD activity for incongruent compared to congruent audiovisual pairs bilaterally in the intraparietal sulcus and supramarginal gyrus, and in the left middle frontal gyrus. We compared this activity to independent functional contrasts designed to test competing explanations of sound symbolism, but found no evidence for mediation via language, and only limited evidence for accounts based on multisensory integration and a general magnitude system. Instead, we suggest that the observed incongruency effects are likely to reflect phonological processing and/or multisensory attention. These findings advance our understanding of sound-to-meaning mapping in the brain.