An Accessory Study of "Phonetic Symbolism"

Abstract

In 1929 Sapir published a brief study from which he concluded that certain vocalic and consonantal sounds have a definite symbolic significance unrelated to the associative and linguistic value commonly attached to words.' His method consisted in presenting two 'unfamiliar' words (e.g. mal and mil), to which a meaning (e.g. 'table') was arbitrarily attached. His subjects reported whether mal symbolized a larger or a smaller table when compared with the word mil. The results indicated that there was a tendency for vowels near the a-end of the vocalic scale to imply 'largeness' and for those near the i-end to imply 'smallness,' quite apart from linguistic uses of these sounds. A like reference was also discovered for certain consonants.In the immediately preceding article in this JOURNAL S. S. Newman has, at the instance of Professor Sapir, again attacked the problem of phonetic symbolism, applying to his research a method of statistical treatment not used in the earlier study, and using a much larger body of material than the earlier study commanded.2 Newman's results generally confirm Sapir's earlier conclusions, making the interpretation much more specific. Newman again makes phonetic symbolism apply differentially to 'large' and 'small' and adds also the contrasting pair 'bright' and 'dark.' The distribution of his vowel-sounds and consonant-sounds upon the scale of magnitude (large-small) and the scale of brilliance (dark-light) leads him to believe that it is determined by such mechanical factors as position of the tongue in articulation, resonance within the mouth, the size of the oral cavity, and length of the vowel sound. Some differences in these factors with respect to their influence upon the two scales are thought to be significant.Upon the appearance of the first article, we were led to undertake a bit of experimentation upon the subject, partly to adapt the method to the psychological laboratory and partly to discover how far "phonetic

Iconicity in vocalization, comparisons with gesture, and implications for theories on the evolution of language

“…The number of large phonemes in the selected name varied according to the size of the object. Experiments show further that consistent sound-meaning judgments extend to a host of meanings that may relate to size, including gender and quickness, and also attitudes like affection, intimacy, disdain, and acquiescence (e.g., Bentley & Varon, 1933;Jespersen, 1933;Newman, 1933;Ohala, 1994).…”

“…The use of prosody for the iconic expression of emotion is understood to be motivated by a deeply natural connection, and consequently, it is often disregarded as a trivial case of vocal iconicity (e.g., Shintel et al, 2006). Bolinger (1986), for example, proposed that intonation originated as "part of a gestural complex whose primitive and still surviving function is the signaling of emotion" (p. 195). For instance, vocalizations with high pitch and intensity are naturally associated with excitement and high arousal, while low-pitch, low-intensity vocalizations indicate low arousal and boredom.…”

Effects of phonetic symbolism on paired-associate learning

“…However, in a sense, the very fact that the phenomena exist with nonsense syllables or foreign words may ultimately lead one to reject phonetic symbolism (cf. Bentley & Varon, 1933;Maltzman, Morrisett, & Brooks, 1956, e.g., denied the existence of phonetic symbolism). This follows from the fact that both nonsense syllables and foreign words (unknown to the subject) lack meaning.…”

The psychological reality of sonority in English

“…On the other hand, in defense of Bolinger's hypothesis, older people should have more experience with this phenomenon, both in terms of the number of tokens and their types, and therefore have a firmer basis on which to respond (analogically) to these nonce forms. As an aside, Newman (1933) also obtained more consistent results from subjects older than 15 on a similar semantic task, but his outcome was later shown to be spurious by Bentley and Varon (1933). Nevertheless, because of these results, one of the tests I carry out with my own data in Section 6 is whether responses reliably differ by age group, and the answer is no.…”

“…The elements which make them up are often called kernels or conjuncts. A sample of the references on this subject includes Scott (1913), Morawski (1927), Bentley and Varon (1933), Newman (1933), Abraham (1950), Brown et al (1955), Malkiel (1959Malkiel ( , 1968, Bolinger (1962), Thun (1963, Marchand (1969), Brown (1970), Cooper and Ross (1975), Campbell and Anderson (1976), Drachman (1977), Pinker andBirdsong (1979), Cardona (1988), and Oum and Haiman (2000). However, none of these works offers a formal analysis or explanation for the roly-poly phenomenon.…”