Abstract
In this study, we examined whether vowel length affected the perceptual and emotional evaluations of Japanese sound-symbolic words. The perceptual and emotional features of Japanese sound-symbolic words, which included short and long vowels, were evaluated by 209 native Japanese speakers. The results showed that subjective evaluations of familiarity, visual imageability, auditory imageability, tactile imageability, emotional valence, arousal, and length were significantly higher for sound-symbolic words with long vowels compared to those with short vowels. Additionally, a subjective evaluation of speed was significantly higher for written Japanese sound-symbolic words with short vowels than for those with long vowels. The current findings suggest that vowel length in written Japanese sound-symbolic words increases the perceptually and emotionally subjective evaluations of Japanese sound-symbolic words.
Highlights
Perceptual and EmotionalIn sound symbolism, linguistic features non-arbitrarily associate with perceptual or emotional features [1,2,3,4,5]
Cronbach’s alphas were calculated to assess reliabilities of semantic differential scales and a linear mixed-effects model analysis was conducted to examine the differences between subjective evaluations of long vowels (LV) and short vowels (SV)
Two findings emerged from this survey: First, written Japanese sound-symbolic words with long vowels were perceived as more familiar, visually imageable, auditorily imageable, tactilely imageable, preferable, excited, and longer than those with short vowels
Summary
Linguistic features non-arbitrarily associate with perceptual or emotional features [1,2,3,4,5]. One study reported that auditory features of spoken pseudowords cross-modal associated with visual features of figures [8]. Emotional features are connected to linguistic information [10]. In addition to sound-symbolic associations between pseudowords (new words) and referents, real words can be sound symbolically associated with perceptual or abstract features [11,12]. Previous findings suggested that the oral shapes to pronounce linguistic features were associated with perceptual and emotional features [5,13], whereas written linguistic features (alphabetic letters and other characters) were associated with them [14,15,16]. Namba and Kambara (2020) reported that the oral shapes to produce
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