Abstract
Humans share the ability to intuitively map ‘sharp’ or ‘round’ pseudowords, such as ‘bouba’ versus ‘kiki’, to abstract edgy versus round shapes, respectively. This effect, known as sound symbolism, appears early in human development. The phylogenetic origin of this phenomenon, however, is unclear: are humans the only species capable of experiencing correspondences between speech sounds and shapes, or could similar effects be observed in other animals? Thus far, evidence from an implicit matching experiment failed to find evidence of this sound symbolic matching in great apes, suggesting its human uniqueness. However, explicit tests of sound symbolism have never been conducted with nonhuman great apes. In the present study, a language-competent bonobo completed a cross-modal matching-to-sample task in which he was asked to match spoken English words to pictures, as well as ‘sharp’ or ‘round’ pseudowords to shapes. Sound symbolic trials were interspersed among English words. The bonobo matched English words to pictures with high accuracy, but did not show any evidence of spontaneous sound symbolic matching. Our results suggest that speech exposure/comprehension alone cannot explain sound symbolism. This lends plausibility to the hypothesis that biological differences between human and nonhuman primates could account for the putative human specificity of this effect.
Highlights
IntroductionThe arbitrariness of the linguistic form is a design feature of human language [1,2]
In classic semantic theories, the arbitrariness of the linguistic form is a design feature of human language [1,2]
Experimental procedures conformed to the regulations of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the Ape Initiative, approval number 170904-01R
Summary
The arbitrariness of the linguistic form is a design feature of human language [1,2]. There are instances in human languages where an arbitrary relationship between linguistic form and meaning does not hold In these cases of sound symbolism, meaningless speech sounds can evoke the meaning of a range of sensory properties [3]. In the ‘maluma-takete’ example, the ‘round’ sounding pseudoword ‘maluma’ fits better to describe an abstract round figure, whereas the ‘sharp’ sounding pseudoword ‘takete’ fits better to an abstract edgy figure. In this intuitive soundshape mapping, combinations of certain speech sounds fit better to express the visual property of a round or of an edgy shape. Back vowels versus front vowels [6] or sonorants versus obstruents [7] are better mapped to a round versus an edgy abstract shape, respectively
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