This paper reports two case studies of sound symbolism using the naturalistic name corpora of characters from Disney and Pokémon. Building upon previous studies of sound symbolism, we tested two hypotheses: (1) voiced obstruents, which are generally associated with negative images, are favored in villainous characters’ names, while (2) bilabial consonants, which are symbolically associated with cuteness, are disfavored in such names. The results show that these tendencies hold in our corpora, suggesting that a concept that is as complex as “villain” can be signaled via sound symbolism. Theoretical implications for cognitive linguistics based on our results are discussed.

This paper investigates the relationship between embodied interaction and symbolic communication. We report about an experiment in which simulated autonomous robotic agents, whose control systems were evolved through an artificial evolutionary process, use abstract communication signals to coordinate their behavior in a context independent way. This use of signals includes some fundamental aspects of sentences in natural languages which are discussed by using the concept of joint attention in relation to the grammatical structure of sentences.

This chapter explores how Japanese mimetics are used to verbally express the texture of rice crackers in real and imagined cases. Two experiments were conducted to test whether the use of mimetics varies when eating rice crackers as opposed to merely imagining eating rice crackers. The analysis of the mimetics used to express the physically perceived texture and the imagined texture of the rice crackers shows that these two situations may have different prototypes of rice crackers. This study suggests that the degree of iconicity of the same mimetics can vary according to the contexts in which they are used.

A new interactive "wall game" is proposed to study the emergence of rules and symbols in interaction dynamics. In this game, two human players alternately configure a pattern on a board to communicate with each other. Distinct from related studies, players in this game have no explicit game scores or tasks to optimize. Any dynamics occurring in this game are therefore ad-hoc and on-going processes. There were three major findings in this paper. (i) The subjects mainly interacted in two modes: a dynamic mode where players proceed through the game without assigning any meanings to the pattern, and a metaphoric mode, where players process with narrative reflection. (ii) Subjects spontaneously switch between the two modes, but this switching is suppressed when playing alone. (iii) A transition diagram of the board pattern can be used to label the two modes, e.g. linearity of the diagram is correlated with the metaphoric mode. One of the main features of grammar is to display subjects' intentionality in a systematic way. We argue that the switching between the two modes observed in our experiment can be taken as a grammatical aspect that emerged in the process. These modes express the speaker's perspective in the same manner as grammatical elements do in natural language. The switching behavior should be seen as a process that embodies a player's intention using the medium (in this case, the patterns in the wall game), and a player's exploration of the medium is a necessary step before generating a grammar structure.

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