Size sound symbolism in mothers' speech to their infants.

Six-month-olds infer object size based on pitch: they map high-pitched vowels onto smaller objects and low-pitched vowels onto larger objects (Peña et al., 2011). The 'sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis' (Imai & Kita, 2014) proposes that this may support understanding of word-meaning correspondences; by drawing on iconic pairings between linguistic cues and corresponding referents (e.g., higher pitch for smaller objects), infants develop understanding of word-referent associations. Here we analyse mother-child interactions, testing whether sound-symbolic pitch-size correspondences occur in infant-directed speech. 40 dyads engaged in (semi-)naturalistic interaction around picture books containing images of toys of varying sizes. We compare mothers' pitch when referring to small versus large toys, analysing i) actual size (bigger vs. smaller toys); ii) relative toy size congruence (i.e., congruent vs. incongruent with real-world expectation); and iii) transparency of the test paradigm as regards its focus on size contrastiveness (non-transparent, moderately transparent, highly transparent) to observe the nuances of size sound symbolism in infant-directed speech.

The Anatomy of Iconicity: Cumulative Structural Analogies Underlie Objective and Subjective Measures of Iconicity.

The vocabularies of natural languages harbour many instances of iconicity, where words show a perceived resemblance between aspects of form and meaning. An open challenge in this domain is how to reconcile different operationalizations of iconicity and link them to an empirically grounded theory. Here we combine three ways of looking at iconicity using a set of 239 iconic words from 5 spoken languages (Japanese, Korean, Semai, Siwu and Ewe). Data on guessing accuracy serves as a baseline measure of probable iconicity and provides variation that we seek to explain and predict using structure-mapping theory and iconicity ratings. We systematically trace a range of cross-linguistically attested form-meaning correspondences in the dataset, yielding a word-level measure of cumulative iconicity that we find to be highly predictive of guessing accuracy. In a rating study, we collect iconicity judgments for all words from 78 participants. The ratings are well-predicted by our measure of cumulative iconicity and also correlate strongly with guessing accuracy, showing that rating tasks offer a scalable method to measure iconicity. Triangulating the measures reveals how structure-mapping can help open the black box of experimental measures of iconicity. While none of the methods is perfect, taken together they provide a well-rounded way to approach the meaning and measurement of iconicity in natural language vocabulary.

DIFFERENTIAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE SPECTRO-TEMPORAL AND VOCAL CHARACTERISTICS OF AUDITORY PSEUDOWORDS TO MULTIPLE SOUND-SYMBOLIC MAPPINGS.

Sound symbolism, the idea that the sound of a word alone can convey its meaning, is often studied using auditory pseudowords. For example, people reliably assign the auditory pseudowords "bouba" and "kiki" to rounded and pointed shapes, respectively. Previously we showed that representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of the shape ratings of auditory pseudowords correlated significantly with RDMs of acoustic parameters reflecting spectro-temporal variations; the ratings also correlated significantly with voice quality features. Here, participants rated auditory pseudowords on scales representing categorical opposites across seven meaning domains, including shape. Examination of the relationships of the perceptual ratings to spectro-temporal and vocal parameters of the pseudowords essentially replicated our previous findings for shape while varying patterns emerged for the other domains. Thus, the spectro-temporal and vocal properties of spoken pseudowords contribute differentially to sound-symbolic mapping depending on the meaning domain.

Emotional responses of Korean and Chinese women to Hangul phonemes to the gender of an artificial intelligence voice.

Introduction: This study aimed to explore the arousal and valence that people experience in response to Hangul phonemes based on the gender of an AI speaker through comparison with Korean and Chinese cultures. Methods: To achieve this, 42 Hangul phonemes were used, in a combination of three Korean vowels and 14 Korean consonants, to explore cultural differences in arousal, valence, and the six foundational emotions based on the gender of an AI speaker. A total 136 Korean and Chinese women were recruited and randomly assigned to one of two conditions based on voice gender (man or woman). Results and discussion: This study revealed significant differences in arousal levels between Korean and Chinese women when exposed to male voices. Specifically, Chinese women exhibited clear differences in emotional perceptions of male and female voices in response to voiced consonants. These results confirm that arousal and valence may differ with articulation types and vowels due to cultural differences and that voice gender can affect perceived emotions. This principle can be used as evidence for sound symbolism and has practical implications for voice gender and branding in AI applications.

The role of valence and arousal for phonological iconicity in the lexicon of German: a cross-validation study using pseudoword ratings.

The notion of sound symbolism receives increasing interest in psycholinguistics. Recent research - including empirical effects of affective phonological iconicity on language processing (Adelman et al., 2018; Conrad et al., 2022) - suggested language codes affective meaning at a basic phonological level using specific phonemes as sublexical markers of emotion. Here, in a series of 8 rating-experiments, we investigate the sensitivity of language users to assumed affectively-iconic systematic distribution patterns of phonemes across the German vocabulary:After computing sublexical-affective-values (SAV) concerning valence and arousal for the entire German phoneme inventory according to occurrences of syllabic onsets, nuclei and codas in a large-scale affective normative lexical database, we constructed pseudoword material differing in SAV to test for subjective affective impressions.Results support affective iconicity as affective ratings mirrored sound-to-meaning correspondences in the lexical database. Varying SAV of otherwise semantically meaningless pseudowords altered affective impressions: Higher arousal was consistently assigned to pseudowords made of syllabic constituents more often used in high-arousal words - contrasted by less straightforward effects of valence SAV. Further disentangling specific differential effects of the two highly-related affective dimensions valence and arousal, our data clearly suggest arousal, rather than valence, as the relevant dimension driving affective iconicity effects.

Statistical Relationships Between Phonological Form, Emotional Valence and Arousal of Spanish Words.

A number of studies have provided evidence of limited non-arbitrary associations between the phonological forms and meanings of affective words, a finding referred to as affective sound symbolism. Here, we explored whether the affective connotations of Spanish words might have more extensive statistical relationships with phonological/phonetic features, or affective form typicality. After eliminating words with poor affective rating agreement and morphophonological redundancies (e.g., negating prefixes), we found evidence of significant form typicality for emotional valence, emotionality, and arousal in a large sample of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. These affective form-meaning mappings remained significant even when controlling for a range of lexico-semantic variables. We show that affective variables and their corresponding form typicality measures are able to significantly predict lexical decision performance using a megastudy dataset. Overall, our findings provide new evidence that affective form typicality is a statistical property of the Spanish lexicon.

Sound symbolism in manual and vocal responses: phoneme-response interactions associated with grasping as well as vertical and size dimensions of keypresses.

It has been shown that reading the vowel [i] and consonant [t] facilitates precision grip responses, while [ɑ] and [k] are associated with faster power grip responses. A similar effect has been observed when participants perform responses with small or large response keys. The present study investigated whether the vowels and consonants could produce different effects with the grip responses and keypresses when the speech units are read aloud (Experiment 1) or silently (Experiment 2). As a second objective, the study investigated whether the recently observed effect, in which the upper position of a visual stimulus is associated with faster vocalizations of the high vowel and the lower position is associated with the low vowel, can be observed in manual responses linking, for example, the [i] with responses of the upper key and [ɑ] with lower responses. Firstly, the study showed that when the consonants are overtly articulated, the interaction effect can be observed only with the grip responses, while the vowel production was shown to systematically influence small/large keypresses, as well as precision/power grip responses. Secondly, the vowel [i] and consonant [t] were associated with the upper responses, while [ɑ] and [k] were associated with the lower responses, particularly in the overt articulation task. The paper delves into the potential sound-symbolic implications of these phonetic elements, suggesting that their acoustic and articulatory characteristics might implicitly align them with specific response magnitudes, vertical positions, and grip types.

Sound symbolic associations in Spanish emotional words: affective dimensions and discrete emotions.

Sound symbolism refers to non-arbitrary associations between word forms and meaning, such as those observed for some properties of sounds and size or shape. Recent evidence suggests that these connections extend to emotional concepts. Here we investigated two types of non-arbitrary relationships. Study 1 examined whether iconicity scores (i.e. resemblance-based mapping between aspects of a word's form and its meaning) for words can be predicted from ratings in the affective dimensions of valence and arousal and/or the discrete emotions of happiness, anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Words denoting negative concepts were more likely to have more iconic word forms. Study 2 explored whether statistical regularities in single phonemes (i.e. systematicity) predicted ratings in affective dimensions and/or discrete emotions. Voiceless (/p/, /t/) and voiced plosives (/b/, /d/, /g/) were related to high arousing words, whereas high arousing negative words tended to include fricatives (/s/, /z/). Hissing consonants were also more likely to occur in words denoting all negative discrete emotions. Additionally, words conveying certain discrete emotions included specific phonemes. Overall, our data suggest that emotional features might explain variations in iconicity and provide new insight about phonemic patterns showing sound symbolic associations with the affective properties of words.

Using artificial intelligence to explore sound symbolic expressions of gender in American English.

This study investigates the extent to which gender can be inferred from the phonemes that make up given names and words in American English. Two extreme gradient boosted algorithms were constructed to classify words according to gender, one using a list of the most common given names (N∼1,000) in North America and the other using the Glasgow Norms (N∼5,500), a corpus consisting of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs which have each been assigned a psycholinguistic score of how they are associated with male or female behaviour. Both models report significant findings, but the model constructed using given names achieves a greater accuracy despite being trained on a smaller dataset suggesting that gender is expressed more robustly in given names than in other word classes. Feature importance was examined to determine which features were contributing to the decision-making process. Feature importance scores revealed a general pattern across both models, but also show that not all word classes express gender the same way. Finally, the models were reconstructed and tested on the opposite dataset to determine whether they were useful in classifying opposite samples. The results showed that the models were not as accurate when classifying opposite samples, suggesting that they are more suited to classifying words of the same class.

Iconicity ratings for 14,000+ English words.

Iconic words and signs are characterized by a perceived resemblance between aspects of their form and aspects of their meaning. For example, in English, iconic words include peep and crash, which mimic the sounds they denote, and wiggle and zigzag, which mimic motion. As a semiotic property of words and signs, iconicity has been demonstrated to play a role in word learning, language processing, and language evolution. This paper presents the results of a large-scale norming study for more than 14,000 English words conducted with over 1400 American English speakers. We demonstrate the utility of these ratings by replicating a number of existing findings showing that iconicity ratings are related to age of acquisition, sensory modality, semantic neighborhood density, structural markedness, and playfulness. We discuss possible use cases and limitations of the rating dataset, which is made publicly available.

Sound-action symbolism in relation to precision manipulation and whole-hand grasp usage.

It has been suggested that actions can provide a fruitful conceptual context for sound symbolism phenomena, and that tight interaction between manual and articulatory processes might cause that hand actions, in particular, are sound-symbolically associated with specific speech sounds. Experiment 1 investigated whether novel words, built from speech sounds that have been previously linked to precision or power grasp responses, are implicitly associated with perceived actions that present precision manipulation or whole-hand grasp tool-use or the corresponding utilisation pantomimes. In the two-alternative forced-choice task, the participants were more likely to match novel words to tool-use actions and corresponding pantomimes that were sound-symbolically congruent with the words. Experiment 2 showed that the same or even larger sound-action symbolism effect can be observed when the pantomimes present unfamiliar utilisation actions. Based on this we propose that the sound-action symbolism might originate from the same sensorimotor mechanisms that process the meaning of iconic gestural signs. The study presents a novel sound-action phenomenon and supports the view that hand-mouth interaction might manifest itself by associating specific speech sounds with grasp-related utilisations.

Front Is High and Back Is Low: Sound-Space Iconicity in Finnish.

Previous investigations have shown various interactions between spatial concepts and speech sounds. For instance, the front-high vowel [i] is associated with the concept of forward, and the back-high vowel [o] is associated with the concept of backward. Three experiments investigated whether the concepts of forward/front and backward/back are associated with high- and low-pitched vocalizations, respectively, in Finnish. In Experiments 1 and 2, the participants associated the high-pitched vocalization with the forward-directed movement and the low-pitched vocalizations with the backward-directed movement. In Experiment 3, the same effect was observed in relation to the concepts of front of and back of. We propose that these observations present a novel sound-space symbolism phenomenon in which spatial concepts of forward/front and backward/back are iconically associated with high- and low-pitched speech sounds. This observation is discussed in relation to the grounding of semantic knowledge of these spatial concepts in the movements of articulators such as relative front/back-directed movements of the tongue.

Effects of Iconicity in Recognition Memory.

Iconicity refers to a resemblance between word form and meaning. Previous work has shown that iconic words are learned earlier and processed faster. Here, we examined whether iconic words are recognized better on a recognition memory task. We also manipulated the level at which items were encoded-with a focus on either their meaning or their form-in order to gain insight into the mechanism by which iconicity would affect memory. In comparison with non-iconic words, iconic words were associated with a higher false alarm rate, a lower d' score, and a lower response criterion in Experiment 1. We did not observe any interaction between iconicity and encoding condition. To test the generalizability of these findings, we examined effects of iconicity in a recognition memory megastudy across 3880 items. After controlling for a variety of lexical and semantic variables, iconicity was predictive of more hits and false alarms, and a lower response criterion in this dataset. In Experiment 2, we examined whether these effects were due to increased feelings of familiarity for iconic items by including a familiar versus recollect decision. This experiment replicated the overall results of Experiment 1 and found that participants were more likely to categorize words that they had seen before as familiar (vs. recollected) if they were iconic. Together, these results demonstrate that iconicity has an effect on memory. We discuss implications for theories of iconicity.

Does Orkish Sound Evil? Perception of Fantasy Languages and Their Phonetic and Phonological Characteristics.

Constructed languages, frequently invented to support world-building in fantasy and science fiction genres, are often intended to sound similar to the characteristics of the people who speak them. The aims of this study are (1) to investigate whether some fictional languages, such as Orkish whose speakers are portrayed as villainous, are rated more negatively by listeners than, for example, the Elvish languages, even when they are all produced without emotional involvement in the voice; and (2) to investigate whether the rating results can be related to the sound structure of the languages under investigation. An online rating experiment with three 7-point semantic differential scales was conducted, in which three sentences from each of 12 fictional languages (Neo-Orkish, Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdul, Adûnaic, Klingon, Vulcan, Atlantean, Dothraki, Na'vi, Kesh, ʕuiʕuid) were rated, spoken by a female and a male speaker. The results from 129 participants indicate that Klingon and Dothraki do indeed sound more unpleasant, evil, and aggressive than the Elvish languages Sindarin and Quenya. Furthermore, this difference in rating is predicted by certain characteristics of the sound structure, such as the percentage of non-German sounds and the percentage of voicing. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to theories of language attitude.

Cognitive neural responses in the semantic comprehension of sound symbolic words and pseudowords.

Introduction: Sound symbolism is the phenomenon of sounds having non-arbitrary meaning, and it has been demonstrated that pseudowords with sound symbolic elements have similar meaning to lexical words. It is unclear how the impression given by the sound symbolic elements is semantically processed, in contrast to lexical words with definite meanings. In event-related potential (ERP) studies, phonological mapping negativity (PMN) and N400 are often used as measures of phonological and semantic processing, respectively. Therefore, in this study, we analyze PMN and N400 to clarify the differences between existing sound symbolic words (onomatopoeia or ideophones) and pseudowords in terms of semantic and phonological processing. Methods: An existing sound symbolic word and pseudowords were presented as an auditory stimulus in combination with a picture of an event, and PMN and N400 were measured while the subjects determined whether the sound stimuli and pictures match or mismatch. Results: In both the existing word and pseudoword tasks, the amplitude of PMN and N400 increased when the picture of an event and the speech sound did not match. Additionally, compared to the existing words, the pseudowords elicited a greater amplitude for PMN and N400. In addition, PMN latency was delayed in the mismatch condition relative to the match condition for both existing sound symbolic words and pseudowords. Discussion: We concluded that established sound symbolic words and sound symbolic pseudowords undergo similar semantic processing. This finding suggests that sound symbolism pseudowords are not judged on a simple impression level (e.g., spiky/round) or activated by other words with similar spellings (phonological structures) in the lexicon, but are judged on a similar contextual basis as actual words.

Often Overlooked Aspects of Sound Symbolism: The Influence of Participants' Characteristics on Size Ratings.

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary mapping between phonetic properties and meanings. The existence and nature of sound symbolism have long been the subject of empirical research. It is rarely recognized, however, that participants' intrinsic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, language knowledge), in addition to the commonly studied phonetic features, may also influence size ratings. Our study aims to empirically investigate the impact of participant-specific characteristics on size ratings: It also aims to examine whether these characteristics have a direct impact when considering the impact of phonetic features or they rather modify the effects of phonetic features. The current research reports a novel analysis of a previously published dataset with new research questions and previously unused (participant-specific) data. We show that (a) the participants' characteristics did not affect overall size ratings; however, (b) in some cases, they modify (intensify or weaken but do not reverse) the effect of phonetic features on size ratings. Our results emphasize a more comprehensive treatment of sound symbolism, one that considers not only phonetic but also non-phonetic factors in sound symbolism research.

Neural basis of sound-symbolic pseudoword-shape correspondences.

Non-arbitrary mapping between the sound of a word and its meaning, termed sound symbolism, is commonly studied through crossmodal correspondences between sounds and visual shapes, e.g., auditory pseudowords, like 'mohloh' and 'kehteh', are matched to rounded and pointed visual shapes, respectively. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a crossmodal matching task to investigate the hypotheses that sound symbolism (1) involves language processing; (2) depends on multisensory integration; (3) reflects embodiment of speech in hand movements. These hypotheses lead to corresponding neuroanatomical predictions of crossmodal congruency effects in (1) the language network; (2) areas mediating multisensory processing, including visual and auditory cortex; (3) regions responsible for sensorimotor control of the hand and mouth. Right-handed participants (n = 22) encountered audiovisual stimuli comprising a simultaneously presented visual shape (rounded or pointed) and an auditory pseudoword ('mohloh' or 'kehteh') and indicated via a right-hand keypress whether the stimuli matched or not. Reaction times were faster for congruent than incongruent stimuli. Univariate analysis showed that activity was greater for the congruent compared to the incongruent condition in the left primary and association auditory cortex, and left anterior fusiform/parahippocampal gyri. Multivoxel pattern analysis revealed higher classification accuracy for the audiovisual stimuli when congruent than when incongruent, in the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal (Broca's area), the left supramarginal, and the right mid-occipital gyri. These findings, considered in relation to the neuroanatomical predictions, support the first two hypotheses and suggest that sound symbolism involves both language processing and multisensory integration.

The Iconicity Ring Hypothesis Bridges the Gap Between Symbol Grounding and Linguistic Relativity.

Kemmerer captured the drastic change in theories of word meaning representations, contrasting the view that word meaning representations are amodal and universal, with the view that they are grounded and language-specific. However, he does not address how language can be simultaneously grounded and language-specific. Here, we approach this question from the perspective of language acquisition and evolution. We argue that adding a new element-iconicity-is critically beneficial and offer the iconicity ring hypothesis, which explains how language-specific, secondary iconicity might emerge from biologically grounded and universally shared iconicity in the course of language acquisition and evolution.

The Whale and the Microorganism: A Tale of a Classic Example and Linguistic Intuitions.

A classic example of the arbitrary relation between the way a word sounds and its meaning is that microorganism is a very long word that refers to a very small entity, whereas whale is a very short word that refers to something very big. This example, originally presented in Hockett's list of language's design features, has been often cited over the years, not only by those discussing the arbitrary nature of language, but also by researchers of sound symbolism. While the two groups disagreed regarding the role of arbitrariness and sound symbolism in language, they both agreed there is a nonsound symbolic relation between word length and entity size in this case. This paper shows that the length of the words whale and microorganism in fact reflects a sound symbolic pattern. An analysis of >600 languages from >100 language families shows that languages use longer words to denote the concept small than they do to denote the concept big. The paper thus shows how explicit judgments might differ from implicit cognitive association and the problem of relying on these in sound symbolism research.

Iconicity in Ideophones: Guessing, Memorizing, and Reassessing.

Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants' are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task-a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective-meaning pairs-indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow-up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives. By comparing the findings from our guessing and memory tasks, we conclude that iconicity is more accessible if a task requires participants to actively seek out sound-meaning associations.