Abstract
Sound symbolism refers to a non-arbitrary relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning. With the aim to better investigate this relationship by using natural languages, in the present cross-linguistic study 215 Italian and Polish participants were asked to listen to words pronounced in 4 unknown non-indo-European languages (Finnish, Japanese, Swahili, Tamil) and to try to guess the correct meaning of each word, by choosing among 3 alternatives visualized on a computer screen. The alternatives were presented in the mother tongue of participants. Three different word categories were presented: nouns, verbs and adjectives. A first overall analysis confirmed a semantic role of sound symbols, the performance of participants being higher than expected by chance. When analyzed separately for each language and for each word category, the results were significant for Finnish and Japanese, whereas the recognition rate was not significantly better than chance for Swahili and Tamil. Results were significant for nouns and verbs, but not for adjectives. We confirm the existence of sound symbolic processing in natural unknown languages, and we speculate that some possible difference in the iconicity of the languages could be the basis for the difference we found. Importantly, the evidence that there were no differences between Italian and Polish participants allows us to conclude that the sound symbolism is independent of the mother tongue of the listener.
Highlights
A central assumption of modern linguistics is that the relationship between the acoustic features of a word and its meaning is fundamentally arbitrary
This seminal assumption regarding the arbitrariness of natural language has been widely acknowledged for decades, a growing body of literature suggests that non-arbitrary correspondences between sound structure and linguistic category exist, and that listeners
This criterion was applied separately for the Italian and the Polish sub-samples, in order to exclude the possibility of phonetic similarity between the foreign languages presented and the mother tongue of participants
Summary
A central assumption of modern linguistics is that the relationship between the acoustic features of a word and its meaning is fundamentally arbitrary. Arbitrariness is considered a distinctive feature of spoken language that differentiates it from other communication systems This seminal assumption regarding the arbitrariness of natural language has been widely acknowledged for decades, a growing body of literature suggests that non-arbitrary correspondences between sound structure and linguistic category exist, and that listeners. In the same years Köhler (1929), in the Book “Gestalt Psychology”, and more recently Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001); Westbury (2005) and Maurer et al (2006), reported that when subjects were presented with a curvy round shape and a spiky angular shape, most of them matched the curvy shape with the nonsense word “maluma” or “bouba” and the spiky shape with the nonsense word “takete” or “kiki” This occurred even though they had never seen these stimuli before. These results indicate that there is a crossmodal correspondence between sound structure of a word and perceptual properties of the figures (shapes), in a process that occurs implicitly and automatically
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