Abstract
In three experiments, we asked whether diverse scripts contain interpretable information about the speech sounds they represent. When presented with a pair of unfamiliar letters, adult readers correctly guess which is /i/ (the ‘ee’ sound in ‘feet’), and which is /u/ (the ‘oo’ sound in ‘shoe’) at rates higher than expected by chance, as shown in a large sample of Singaporean university students (Experiment 1) and replicated in a larger sample of international Internet users (Experiment 2). To uncover what properties of the letters contribute to different scripts' ‘guessability,’ we analysed the visual spatial frequencies in each letter (Experiment 3). We predicted that the lower spectral frequencies in the formants of the vowel /u/ would pattern with lower spatial frequencies in the corresponding letters. Instead, we found that across all spatial frequencies, the letter with more black/white cycles (i.e. more ink) was more likely to be guessed as /u/, and the larger the difference between the glyphs in a pair, the higher the script's guessability. We propose that diverse groups of humans across historical time and geographical space tend to employ similar iconic strategies for representing speech in visual form, and provide norms for letter pairs from 56 diverse scripts.
Highlights
In three experiments, we asked whether diverse scripts contain interpretable information about the speech sounds they represent
We propose that diverse groups of humans across historical time and geographical space tend to employ similar iconic strategies for representing speech in visual form, and provide norms for letter pairs from 56 diverse scripts
In the literature investigating linguistic sound symbolism, there is consensus that meaningful, systematic relationships can be found between the sounds of some words and their referents
Summary
We asked whether diverse scripts contain interpretable information about the speech sounds they represent. We propose that diverse groups of humans across historical time and geographical space tend to employ similar iconic strategies for representing speech in visual form, and provide norms for letter pairs from 56 diverse scripts. Latin letters representing ‘soft’ phonemes (/b/ /m/ and /u/) tend to be wider, and more curved than Latin letters representing ‘sharp’ phonemes (/k/, /t/ and /i/) tend to be more angular This alliance between letter shape and sound has led some to suggest that effects of linguistic sound symbolism previously observed in European studies may be driven by the shapes of written word forms [14,16], or by some combination of letter shape and phoneme sound [25,26,27]. Since ‘activation’ of letter representations is more or less automatic in literate adults, the relationship between visual form and phonological form is difficult to disentangle in these populations
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