Action sound\u2013shape congruencies explain sound symbolism

Konstantina Margiotoudi,Friedemann Pulvermüller

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-69528-4

Abstract

Sound symbolism, the surprising semantic relationship between meaningless pseudowords (e.g., ‘maluma’, ‘takete’) and abstract (round vs. sharp) shapes, is a hitherto unexplained human-specific knowledge domain. Here we explore whether abstract sound symbolic links can be explained by those between the sounds and shapes of bodily actions. To this end, we asked human subjects to match pseudowords with abstract shapes and, in a different experimental block, the sounds of actions with the shapes of the trajectories of the actions causing these same sounds. Crucially, both conditions were also crossed. Our findings reveal concordant matching in the sound symbolic and action domains, and, importantly, significant correlations between them. We conclude that the sound symbolic knowledge interlinking speech sounds and abstract shapes is explained by audiovisual information immanent to action experience along with acoustic similarities between speech and action sounds. These results demonstrate a fundamental role of action knowledge for abstract sound symbolism, which may have been key to human symbol-manipulation ability.

Highlights

Shapiro’s–Wilk tests, performed on the percentage of congruent responses obtained from each subject for each of the five conditions, revealed that normality was violated for two conditions, (Action: W = 0.75, p < 0.001 ) and for (Crossed[2]: W = 0.83, p < 0.001 ) and non-parametric statistics were performed
We found that healthy human individuals perform well on sound-symbolic matching of ‘round’ and ‘sharp’ pseudowords and abstract shapes as they are able to match diagrams of motor trajectories to the sounds of these same ‘round’ and ‘sharp’ actions
There was a significant correlation between our subjects’ performance on sound symbolic and action matching tasks, and this correlation exceeded the level of the relevant control tasks

Summary

Methods

Twenty-four right-handed adults (20 females, age M = 25.04, SD = 3.47) participated in the study. The subjects were native speakers of different languages (8 German, 3 Turkish, 2 Mandarin, 2 English, 2 Greek, 2 Arabic, 1 Spanish, 1 Italian, 1 Albanian, 1 Cantonese, 1 Hungarian). To assure that all subjects understood the oral instructions given in English, all participants succesfully completed the online Cambridge Assessment English test for the English language prior to the e xperiment[36]. In order to be eligible for the study, subjects had to have on the aforementioned test a score equal to or above the B1 level in English. One subject could not complete the experiment due to health issues and her data was excluded from the analysis.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion