Assessing sound symbolism: Investigating phonetic forms, visual shapes and letter fonts in an implicit bouba-kiki experimental paradigm

Abstract

Classically, in the bouba-kiki association task, a subject is asked to find the best association between one of two shapes–a round one and a spiky one–and one of two pseudowords–bouba and kiki. Numerous studies report that spiky shapes are associated with kiki, and round shapes with bouba. This task is likely the most prevalent in the study of non-conventional relationships between linguistic forms and meanings, also known as sound symbolism. However, associative tasks are explicit in the sense that they highlight phonetic and visual contrasts and require subjects to establish a crossmodal link between stimuli of different natures. Additionally, recent studies have raised the question whether visual resemblances between the target shapes and the letters explain the pattern of association, at least in literate subjects. In this paper, we report a more implicit testing paradigm of the bouba-kiki effect with the use of a lexical decision task with character strings presented in round or spiky frames. Pseudowords and words are, furthermore, displayed with either an angular or a curvy font to investigate possible graphemic bias. Innovative analyses of response times are performed with GAMLSS models, which offer a large range of possible distributions of error terms, and a generalized Gama distribution is found to be the most appropriate. No sound symbolic effect appears to be significant, but an interaction effect is in particular observed between spiky shapes and angular letters leading to faster response times. We discuss these results with respect to the visual saliency of angular shapes, priming, brain activation, synaesthesia and ideasthesia.

Vowel Length Expands Perceptual and Emotional Evaluations in Written Japanese Sound-Symbolic Words

“…Cuskley and colleagues reported that written pseudowords with written round letters were associated with round figures, while pseudowords with spikey letters were associated with spiky figures [ 15 ]. Another study showed that written angular letters in spiky shapes as frames facilitated response times in a lexical decision task [ 16 ]. These previous findings suggest that visual properties of linguistic features (e.g., visual characteristics of letters and font styles) could be congruent with the visual properties of figures as referents (spiky or round figures [ 15 ]) or background (e.g., frames [ 16 ]).…”

“…Another study showed that written angular letters in spiky shapes as frames facilitated response times in a lexical decision task [ 16 ]. These previous findings suggest that visual properties of linguistic features (e.g., visual characteristics of letters and font styles) could be congruent with the visual properties of figures as referents (spiky or round figures [ 15 ]) or background (e.g., frames [ 16 ]). In this study, we used written Japanese sound-symbolic words which included long vowels (e.g., フーフー , fuufuu ) and short vowels (e.g., フフ , fufu ).…”

“…In addition to sound-symbolic associations between pseudowords (new words) and referents, real words can be sound symbolically associated with perceptual or abstract features [ 11 , 12 ]. Previous findings suggested that the oral shapes to pronounce linguistic features were associated with perceptual and emotional features [ 5 , 13 ], whereas written linguistic features (alphabetic letters and other characters) were also associated with them [ 14 , 15 , 16 ]. Namba and Kambara (2020) reported that the oral shapes to produce Japanese vowels were connected to specific perceptual and emotional evaluations (e.g., some oral shapes were perceived as bigger, wider, and higher than oral shapes used to produce other vowels) [ 13 ].…”

Is un stylo sharper than une épée? Investigating the interaction of sound symbolism and grammatical gender in English and French speakers

“…Indeed, there is some evidence of this in the literature (see [7, 63, 64]; cf. [66]). It may be that round shape sound symbolism overwhelmed any effects of grammatical gender, but that sharp shape sound symbolism did not.…”

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

“…Cuskley et al (2017) showed that both spoken and written pseudowords (e.g., gege) orthographically associate with meaningless figures (e.g., a round shape). Another study also found that participants quickly matched spiky frames with angular fonts (De Carolis et al, 2018). These findings suggest that while sound symbolism is not an illusion that would actually be explained by purely visual phenomena involving the shape of letters (especially since sound symbolism occurs in human communities who do not have a written system for their languages), the visual shape of written stimuli might lead to additional effects that might partially blur sound symbolic associations.…”