Higher order factors of sound symbolism

Abstract

Sound symbolism refers to associations between certain language sounds (i.e., phonemes) and perceptual and/or semantic properties. Crucially, the different associations of a phoneme do not appear to be wholly independent. For instance, the phoneme /i/ is associated with sharpness, smallness and brightness. Previous work has shown that these properties are all related to one another (Walker et al., 2012). This suggests that higher order factors may underlie sound symbolic associations. In Experiment 1 we measured 25 different associations of phonemes and found that these associations clustered according to the higher order factors of: activity, valence, potency and novelty. In addition, certain phonemes were found to go along with different higher order factors. Then, in Experiments 2a and 2b, we demonstrated that higher order factors can play a role in associations between phonemes and abstract shape stimuli. Together these results characterize the role of higher order semantic properties in sound symbolism and contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying sound symbolism.