Abstract

Prior research on sound symbolism and referent object size establishes that words with front vowels are perceived to refer to smaller objects than do back vowels (Ohala 1997; Klink 2000). Some dialects of American English exhibit vowel movement along the front-back axis which may influence perceived object size. This study focuses on California English /u/-fronting (Hinton et al. 1987) and predicts that shifting from a standardly back vowel [u] to a more front vowel [ʉ] is paired with a shift from a large perceived object size to a smaller perceived object size. This paper describes two experiments in which participants either silently read (reading task) or listened (listening task) to stimulus words and rated perceived object size. California English speakers in the reading task experiment perceived words with /u/ to be smaller than did non-California English speakers. This result suggests that sound symbolic perception is sensitive to fine phonetic variability due to a person’s dialect.

Highlights

  • One long-held assumption in linguistics is that the physical form of a linguistic signal is independent of its meaning

  • This arbitrariness principle holds for the majority of lexical items across languages, but Saussure acknowledges that some forms of sound symbolism, such as onomatopoeia, are problematic for a strong view of arbitrariness

  • Perhaps sound symbolic perception is sensitive the phonetic properties of a person’s dialect and changes in agreement with their dialect’s vowel shift directions. This current study investigates the relationship between sound symbolic perception and phonetic variation due to dialect properties

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Summary

Introduction

One long-held assumption in linguistics is that the physical form of a linguistic signal is independent of its meaning This idea is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure who stated in his Course in General Linguistics that “the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary” Additional sound symbolism research finds similar binary directional relationships in domains such as perceived texture (Köhler 1929; Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001), temperature, gender, and weight (Klink 2000). These directions appear to be consistent across languages, inviting research into which properties of speech sounds contribute meaning. This current study investigates the relationship between sound symbolic perception and phonetic variation due to dialect properties

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