Abstract
abstractThe sound of words has been shown to relate to the meaning that the words denote, an effect that extends beyond morphological properties of the word. Studies of these sound-symbolic relations have described this iconicity in terms of individual phonemes, or alternatively due to acoustic properties (expressed in phonological features) relating to meaning. In this study, we investigated whether individual phonemes or phoneme features best accounted for iconicity effects. We tested 92 participants’ judgements about the appropriateness of 320 nonwords presented in written form, relating to 8 different semantic attributes. For all 8 attributes, individual phonemes fitted participants’ responses better than general phoneme features. These results challenge claims that sound-symbolic effects for visually presented words can access broad, cross-modal associations between sound and meaning, instead the results indicate the operation of individual phoneme to meaning relations. Whether similar effects are found for nonwords presented auditorially remains an open question.
Highlights
In contrast to the traditional assumption in linguistics that the relationship between the spoken form of a word and its meaning is arbitrary, there has been growing interest and evidence of the widespread existence of systematicity and iconicity in spoken language (Blasi, Wichmann, Hammerstom, Stadler, & Christiansen, 2016; Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015; Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala, 1994; Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, & Kirby, 2014; Nuckolls, 1999; Perry, Perlman, & Lupyan, 2015; Sapir, 1929)
The phoneme model fit was significantly better than the phoneme feature model fit, χ2(4) = 17.807, p = .001, so, as for the smallness comparison, responses were best explained in terms of individual phonemes rather than general phoneme features
For eight different attributes drawn from four antonym pairs, various phoneme features and individual phonemes explained significant variance in participants’ responses
Summary
In contrast to the traditional assumption in linguistics that the relationship between the spoken form of a word and its meaning is arbitrary, there has been growing interest and evidence of the widespread existence of systematicity and iconicity in spoken language (Blasi, Wichmann, Hammerstom, Stadler, & Christiansen, 2016; Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015; Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala, 1994; Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, & Kirby, 2014; Nuckolls, 1999; Perry, Perlman, & Lupyan, 2015; Sapir, 1929). There are numerous studies indicating that particular sounds are associated with certain distinctions in meaning in terms of participants’ judgments of matches between labels and their referents This has been exemplified in classic demonstrations that different sounding nonwords, such as maluma and takete, are judged to relate to rounded and angular shapes, respectively (Brand, Monaghan, & Walker, 2018; Fort, Martin, & Peperkamp, 2015; Köhler, 1929; Nielsen & Rendall, 2011, 2013). Such sound symbolic associations between forms of words and meanings have been shown for a range of semantic distinctions, for reviews see French (1977) and Lockwood and Dingemanse (2015)
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