Abstract
Sound symbolism is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between word and meaning. Although a number of behavioral studies demonstrate that both children and adults are universally sensitive to sound symbolism in mimetic words, the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not yet been extensively investigated. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how Japanese mimetic words are processed in the brain. In Experiment 1, we compared processing for motion mimetic words with that for non-sound symbolic motion verbs and adverbs. Mimetic words uniquely activated the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). In Experiment 2, we further examined the generalizability of the findings from Experiment 1 by testing another domain: shape mimetics. Our results show that the right posterior STS was active when subjects processed both motion and shape mimetic words, thus suggesting that this area may be the primary structure for processing sound symbolism. Increased activity in the right posterior STS may also reflect how sound symbolic words function as both linguistic and non-linguistic iconic symbols.
Highlights
Traditional linguistics assumes that language is independent from perceptual, motor, or affective experience and that pairings between a word’s sound and its meaning are arbitrary [1]
To determine whether the right superior temporal sulcus (STS) is the primary structure for sound symbolism processing, we investigated whether this region responds to non-onomatopoeic mimetic words
As indicated by the post-hoc test, the significant main effect for the word class was due to the difference between adverbs and verbs (p = 0.05, Bonferroni corrected), but the rating scores were similar between mimetic words and adverbs and between mimetic words and verbs (p.0.05)
Summary
Traditional linguistics assumes that language is independent from perceptual, motor, or affective experience and that pairings between a word’s sound and its meaning are arbitrary [1]. A large body of linguistic and psychological research has investigated sound symbolism (e.g., [5]). Sound symbolic words are found in many languages including English. A number of languages, including Japanese, have a large grammatically defined word class in which sound symbolism is apparent. These sound symbolic words, which are called mimetics, idiophones, or expressives, are abundant in African [7] and East Asian languages [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. The neural mechanisms of sound symbolism are yet to be sufficiently investigated
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