A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship

Kilpatrick, Alexander J.; Ćwiek, Aleksandra; Lewis, Eleanor T.; Kawahara, Shigeto

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1113143

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The exception to this /p/ which was found to be important in the Glasgow norms model and skewed towards the female category. Cross-linguistically, including AmE, /p/ has been shown to carry sound symbolic information pertaining to friendliness or a lack of threat ( Kilpatrick et al, 2023 ) which might account for its importance in the models. An alternate interpretation is that bilabial plosives are reflective of roundness according to the maluma/takete effect.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using artificial intelligence to explore sound symbolic expressions of gender in American English

Kilpatrick,

Ćwiek

2024

PeerJ Computer Science

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This study investigates the extent to which gender can be inferred from the phonemes that make up given names and words in American English. Two extreme gradient boosted algorithms were constructed to classify words according to gender, one using a list of the most common given names (N∼1,000) in North America and the other using the Glasgow Norms (N∼5,500), a corpus consisting of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs which have each been assigned a psycholinguistic score of how they are associated with male or female behaviour. Both models report significant findings, but the model constructed using given names achieves a greater accuracy despite being trained on a smaller dataset suggesting that gender is expressed more robustly in given names than in other word classes. Feature importance was examined to determine which features were contributing to the decision-making process. Feature importance scores revealed a general pattern across both models, but also show that not all word classes express gender the same way. Finally, the models were reconstructed and tested on the opposite dataset to determine whether they were useful in classifying opposite samples. The results showed that the models were not as accurate when classifying opposite samples, suggesting that they are more suited to classifying words of the same class.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using artificial intelligence to explore sound symbolic expressions of gender in American English

Kilpatrick,

Ćwiek

2024

PeerJ Computer Science

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“…Klink (2000) found that positive traits such as friendliness and prettiness are associated with front vowels in American English. Kilpatrick et al (2023) showed that cross-linguistically so-called friendship values in Pokémon are typically high in those pocket monsters with bilabial plosives in their names.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cuteness modulates size sound symbolism at its extremes

Schmitz,

Cicek,

Nguyen

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Research on sound symbolism is concerned with the non-arbitrary connection between speech sounds and different types of sensory information, and has met increased interest during the last decades. However, despite the rapidly growing body of research, one issue that remains understudied is whether different types of sensory information interact with each other in regard to sound symbolic effects. The experimental study reported here focuses on two types of sensory information and their potential interaction: vowel quality and cuteness. With speakers of German as participants, we conducted a forced-choice task in which size ratings were elicited for auditory pseudoword stimuli with different vowel qualities. Pseudowords were introduced as names of alien creatures, which were used as visual stimuli in the experiment. For the same creatures, cuteness was assessed via a cuteness judgement task. Confirming previous research, /aː/ was associated with largeness and /iː/ was associated with smallness. Regarding the interaction of vowel quality and cuteness, we found that cuteness modulates size associations in /aː/, /iː/, and /yː/. For /aː/ size increased, while for /iː/ and /yː/ size decreased with increasing cuteness. Our findings call for taking into account all types of sensory information present when researching sound symbolism.

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Cuteness modulates size sound symbolism at its extremes

Schmitz,

Cicek,

Nguyen

et al. 2023

Open Linguistics

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Despite the rapidly growing body of research on sound symbolism, one issue that remains understudied is whether different types of sensory information interact in their sound symbolic effects. The experimental study reported here consisted of two tasks and focused on one such potential interaction: size associations and cuteness. First, a forced-choice task was conducted in which size ratings were elicited for pseudowords containing different vowels and consonants. The pseudowords were introduced as names of alien creatures, which were used as visual stimuli in the experiment. Second, the cuteness of alien creatures was assessed in a judgement task. Both tasks were completed by the same group of German speakers. In line with previous research, /aː/ was associated with largeness and /iː/ was associated with smallness. Further, we found that cuteness modulates size associations in /aː/ and /iː/. For /aː/ judged size increased, while for /iː/ judged size decreased with increasing cuteness. Regarding consonants, we found that /ʁ/ evoked higher size associations than other consonants under investigation. Interactions of cuteness and consonants did not reach significance. Our findings call for the integration of other possible factors and features that might show sound symbolic effects or interactions with such in sound symbolism research.

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A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship

Cited by 3 publications

References 74 publications

Using artificial intelligence to explore sound symbolic expressions of gender in American English

Using artificial intelligence to explore sound symbolic expressions of gender in American English

Cuteness modulates size sound symbolism at its extremes

Cuteness modulates size sound symbolism at its extremes

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