A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Although the sound-meaning relationship is often arbitrary (Saussure 1916), cases exist in which some sounds correspond to certain meanings. Such association between sounds and meanings is known as sound symbolism, and there has been a longstanding interest in the existence and the nature of sound symbolism. This paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that certain sound symbolisms hold robustly across languages. In particular, we investigate how the images of size (small or large) are affected by three phonetic factors: the height of vowels, the backness of vowels, and voicing in obstruents. Our rating experiment of four languages—Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean—shows that these three factors contribute to the images of size, with only a few exceptions. To explain the results, we offer phonetic grounding of these size-related sound symbolic patterns. We further raise the possibility that these phonetically grounded sound symbolic patterns are ‘embodied’ in the sense of Johnson (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999).

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

“…In addition, participants are faster to classify a shape's size if a sound-symbolically-congruent (vs. incongruent) vowel is simultaneously presented auditorily (Ohtake & Haryu, 2013). The effect has been demonstrated across speakers of different languages (e.g., Shinohara & Kawahara, 2010) and at different points in the life span (e.g., in the looking times of 4-month-old infants; Peña, Mehler, & Nespor, 2011).…”

“…In fact, there is no need to attribute the phenomenon to one or the other; most theorists allow for both to potentially play a role (e.g., Newman, 1933;Nuckolls, 1999;Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001;Sapir, 1929;Shinohara & Kawahara, 2010;Westermann, 1927). This is commensurate with the notion of phonemes as bundles of acoustic and articulatory features, either/both of which can be associated with targets in sound symbolism (e.g., Tsur, 2006).…”

“…While there are a number of proposals, there is a scarcity of experimental work focused on adjudicating between them. One potential reason for this is that the mechanisms have yet to be thoroughly described and evaluated in a single work (though see Deroy & Auvray, 2013;Fischer-Jørgensen, 1978;French, 1977;Johansson & Zlatev, 2013;Masuda, 2007;Nuckolls, 1999;Shinohara & Kawahara, 2010); that is the aim of the present article. We begin by describing two well-known instances of sound symbolism to serve as reference points.…”

The influence of dialect in sound symbolic size perception

“…Prior research on sound symbolism and size consistently finds that words containing low vowels are perceived to refer to larger objects compared to high vowels (Sapir 1929;Shinohara & Kawahara 2010) and back vowels are perceived to refer to larger objects compared to front vowels (Ohala 1997;Klink 2000). These directions are indicated by the outer arrows in Figure 1.…”

“…Experiments. The general experimental procedure was modeled after Shinohara & Kawahara (2010). Participants rated the perceived object size of V.CVC nonce words (shown in Table 1) on a Likert scale from 1-4 (Very Small to Very Large).…”