When Gestures Do or Do Not Follow Language-Specific Patterns of Motion Expression in Speech: Evidence from Chinese, English and Turkish.

Speakers of different languages (e.g., English vs. Turkish) show a binary split in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech and co-speech gesture but not in silent gesture. In this study, we focused on Mandarin Chinese, a language that does not follow the binary split in its expression of motion in speech, and asked whether adult Chinese speakers would follow the language-specific speech patterns in co-speech but not silent gesture, thus showing a pattern akin to Turkish and English adult speakers in their description of animated motion events. Our results provided evidence for this pattern, with Chinese-as well as English and Turkish-speakers following language-specific patterns in speech and co-speech gesture but not in silent gesture. Our results provide support for the "thinking-for-speaking" account, namely that language influences thought only during online, but not offline, production of speech.

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

The bouba/kiki effect-the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape-is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki. Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki. These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)'.

Vocal communication of magnitude across language, age, and auditory experience.

Like many other vocalizing vertebrates, humans convey information about their body size through the sound of their voice. Vocalizations of larger animals are typically longer in duration, louder in intensity, and lower in frequency. We investigated people's ability to use voice-size correspondences to communicate about the magnitude of external referents. First, we asked hearing children, as well as deaf children and adolescents, living in China to improvise nonlinguistic vocalizations to distinguish between paired items contrasting in magnitude (e.g., a long vs. short string, a big vs. small ball). Then we played these vocalizations back to adult listeners in the United States and China to assess their ability to correctly guess the intended referents. We find that hearing and deaf producers both signaled greater magnitude items with longer and louder vocalizations and with smaller formant spacing. Only hearing producers systematically used fundamental frequency, communicating greater magnitude with higher fo. The vocalizations of both groups were understandable to Chinese and American listeners, although accuracy was higher with vocalizations from older producers. American listeners relied on the same acoustic properties as Chinese listeners: both groups interpreted vocalizations with longer duration and greater intensity as referring to greater items; neither American nor Chinese listeners consistently used fo or formant spacing as a cue. These findings show that the human ability to use vocalizations to communicate about the magnitude of external referents is highly robust, extending across listeners of disparate linguistic and cultural backgrounds, as well as across age and auditory experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures.

Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizations could have played a similar role. We report the first extensive cross-cultural study investigating whether people from diverse linguistic backgrounds can understand novel vocalizations for a range of meanings. In two comprehension experiments, we tested whether vocalizations produced by English speakers could be understood by listeners from 28 languages from 12 language families. Listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested. Our findings challenge the often-cited idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation, demonstrating that in the absence of words people can use vocalizations to communicate a variety of meanings.