Affective Arousal Links Sound to Meaning

Abstract

Prior investigations have demonstrated that people tend to link pseudowords such as bouba to rounded shapes and kiki to spiky shapes, but the cognitive processes underlying this matching bias have remained controversial. Here, we present three experiments underscoring the fundamental role of emotional mediation in this sound–shape mapping. Using stimuli from key previous studies, we found that kiki-like pseudowords and spiky shapes, compared with bouba-like pseudowords and rounded shapes, consistently elicit higher levels of affective arousal, which we assessed through both subjective ratings (Experiment 1, N = 52) and acoustic models implemented on the basis of pseudoword material (Experiment 2, N = 70). Crucially, the mediating effect of arousal generalizes to novel pseudowords (Experiment 3, N = 64, which was preregistered). These findings highlight the role that human emotion may play in language development and evolution by grounding associations between abstract concepts (e.g., shapes) and linguistic signs (e.g., words) in the affective system.

Language evolution: examining the link between cross-modality and aggression through the lens of disorders

“…Overall, their structural simplicity, their relationship with less sophisticated forms of cross-modal thinking (mostly related to sensory information), and their stronger link to emotions (e.g. [65]) make ideophones another useful proxy for a stepping stone, an entry, into initial stages of grammar in human evolution. In truth, vivid compounds and ideophones may share other features of interest, including possibly a common neurobiological substrate.…”

“…15While in our previous work [28] we focused on the interactions between reduced aggression and grammar structure, recent findings by Aryani and colleagues [65] suggest that these changes in aggression management could have also interacted with word structure, promoting iconic effects linked to cross-modality. Accordingly, these researchers have shown that emotional mediation contributes decisively to sound–shape mappings, as in bouba–kiki effects (§3).…”

Pictorial Referents Facilitate Recognition and Retrieval Speeds of Associations Between Novel Words in a Second Language (L2) and Referents

“…Third, the associative learning of words and referents might be affected by the soundsymbolic effects between words and referents. For example, when participants judge whether the name of a presented meaningless round figure is bouba (malma) or kiki (takete), they consistently choose bouba as the name of the round figure (bouba-kiki effects; Köhler, 1947;Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001;Westbury, 2005;Aryani et al, 2020). In addition, each sound-symbolic word, each written vowel, or each mouth shape to pronounce a vowel is associated with specific, subjective evaluations (perceptual imageabilities and emotional features; e.g., Namba and Kambara, 2020;Ando et al, 2021;Kambara and Umemura, 2021).…”

Sound-Symbolic Semantics of Written Japanese Vowels in a Paper-Based Survey Study

“…In fact, sound-symbolic phenomena occur in both real words and pseudowords . For example, specific pseudowords (e.g., maluma or bouba) are significantly associated with round figures, while other specific pseudowords (e.g., takete or kiki) are associated with pointy figures (bouba-kiki effect, Köhler, 1947;Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001;Westbury, 2005;Styles and Gawne, 2017;Aryani et al, 2020). In addition, French speakers associate pseudowords including round sounds or grammatically feminine endings with round shapes .…”