Abstract
Experimental and cross-linguistic evidence suggests that certain speech sounds are associated with size, especially high front vowels with ‘small’ and low back vowels with ‘large’. However, empirical evidence that speech sounds are statistically associated with magnitude across words within a language has been mixed and open to methodological critique. Here, we used a random-forest analysis of a near-exhaustive set of English size adjectives (e.g.,tiny, gargantuan) to determine whether the English lexicon is characterized by size-symbolic patterns. We show that sound structure is highly predictive of semantic size in size adjectives, most strongly for the phonemes /ɪ/, /i/, /ɑ/, and /t/. In comparison, an analysis of a much larger set of more than 2,500 general vocabulary words rated for size finds no evidence for size sound symbolism, thereby suggesting that size sound symbolism is restricted to size adjectives. Our findings are the first demonstration that size sound symbolism is a statistical property of the English lexicon.
Highlights
We show that sound structure is highly predictive of semantic size in size adjectives, most strongly for the phonemes /ɪ/, /i/, /ɑ/, and /t/
For the 52 etymologically unrelated adjectives, the random forest was able to predict the large/ small distinction with very high classification accuracy and, more importantly, relatively low out-of-bag prediction error (OOB = 22.30%) indicating that this finding would generalize well to unseen data. The accuracy of this random forest is much better than what would be expected if we naïvely assigned the majority category regardless of which phonemes a word contains, in which case we would be accurate only 65.38% of the time. This shows that for size adjectives, sound structure is highly predictive of semantic size
Our results show that size sound symbolism is a systematic property of English words, but it resides in the lexical domain of size adjectives
Summary
Speech sounds with more high-frequency components, such as the vowel /i/, are associated with smallness (Tarte 1982; Knoeferle et al 2017) This is thought to derive from the fact that smaller things (e.g., animals, objects) typically produce higher-frequency sounds (Ohala 1983). This makes the association of particular vowels with size concepts a form of iconicity, because the acoustic qualities of ‘small’ vowels such as /i/ and /ɪ/ resemble the sounds produced by small things in the world, and vice versa for ‘large’ vowels such as /a/, /ɑ/, /ɔ/, and /o/
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