Abstract
Sound-symbolism, or the direct link between sound and meaning, is typologically and behaviorally attested across languages. However, neuroimaging research has mostly focused on artificial non-words or individual segments, which do not represent sound-symbolism in natural language. We used EEG to compare Japanese ideophones, which are phonologically distinctive sound-symbolic lexical words, and arbitrary adverbs during a sentence reading task. Ideophones elicit a larger visual P2 response than arbitrary adverbs, as well as a sustained late positive complex. Our results and previous literature suggest that the larger P2 may indicate the integration of sound and sensory information by association in response to the distinctive phonology of ideophones. The late positive complex may reflect the facilitated lexical retrieval of arbitrary words in comparison to ideophones. This account provides new evidence that ideophones exhibit similar cross-modal correspondences to those which have been proposed for non-words and individual sounds.
Highlights
Sound-symbolism, most defined as “the direct linkage between sound and meaning” (Hinton et al, 2006, p. 1), has traditionally played a peripheral role in linguistics
Wider recognition of the existence and extent of such words has been hindered until relatively recently by two main factors; a historically Eurocentric linguistic perspective, which has contributed to the assumption that the relative paucity of sound-symbolism in most Indo-European languages is reflective of human language as a whole (Perniss et al, 2010), and a disunity of description and definition (Dingemanse, 2012)
We theorize that the distinctive phonology of ideophones triggers a sensory integration process of sound and the sensory information which the ideophone activates by association, which elicits the larger P2 effect, while the late positive complex may reflect the more effortful retrieval of ideophones in comparison to arbitrary words
Summary
Sound-symbolism, most defined as “the direct linkage between sound and meaning” (Hinton et al, 2006, p. 1), has traditionally played a peripheral role in linguistics. The assumption of an iconic link between form and meaning conflicts profoundly with the principle of arbitrariness (de Saussure, 1959), which holds language as “a wholly symbolic system, [whereby] the elements of which are manipulated on an abstract level of representation” Wider recognition of the existence and extent of such words has been hindered until relatively recently by two main factors; a historically Eurocentric linguistic perspective, which has contributed to the assumption that the relative paucity of sound-symbolism in most Indo-European languages is reflective of human language as a whole (Perniss et al, 2010), and a disunity of description and definition (Dingemanse, 2012). Ideophones are defined as “marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse, 2012), and are found in various natural languages (Firth, 1964; Diffloth, 1972; Childs, 1994; Hamano, 1998; Perniss et al, 2010; Dingemanse, 2012)
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