Abstract
This paper offers cross-experimental verification of a previous study that found that English speakers considered velars, palatals, glides, and high vowels to be sound-symbolic of light and jerky movements. Heavy and smooth movements, by contrast, were associated with affricates, glottals, laterals, and non-high vowels. The present study sought to evaluate these findings through a novel experiment with English speaking subjects, who were asked to choose appropriate sound-symbolically constructed nonce verbs for sentences describing light, heavy, smooth, or jerky manners of motion. Our results support many of Saji et al.’s findings and also offer original insights. We find complex interactions between a sound’s potential for sound-symbolic effects, and its position in initial or second syllables of disyllabic nonce words.
Highlights
Since the publication of Hinton et al (1996), studies of sound symbolism have been thriving.Though stigmatized by 19th century scholars, because of its association with simple ideas about language origin, sound symbolism is a legitimate subject for empirical investigation by linguists and cognitive scientists willing to take on the Saussurian ideal of an all-encompassing arbitrariness underlying human language
Research on sound symbolism commonly acknowledges that language is characterized both by arbitrary, as well as motivated, iconic characteristics (Cuskley 2013; Dingemanse et al 2016; Nuckolls 1999)
What is noteworthy about much of the experimental work on sound symbolism discussed in this review, whether focused on vowels, consonants, or both, is that, in addition to size, the attested correspondences are generally related to static concepts
Summary
Since the publication of Hinton et al (1996), studies of sound symbolism have been thriving. What is noteworthy about much of the experimental work on sound symbolism discussed in this review, whether focused on vowels, consonants, or both, is that, in addition to size, the attested correspondences are generally related to static concepts. These include brightness and darkness (Asano and Yokosawa 2011); colors, such as reds, yellows and greens (Moos et al 2014); shapes, such as spikiness and roundness (Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001; Nielsen and Rendall 2013); and tastes, such as sweet and sour (Simner et al 2010).
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