Developmental change in children’s sensitivity to sound symbolism

Tzeng, Christina Y.; Nygaard, Lynne C.; Namy, Laura L.

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2017.03.004

Cited by 28 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Instead, the present data suggest that sensitivity to sound symbolism is weak in the first months of life, and gradually emerges during (language) development. This is in line with very recent experimental data, showing that sensitivity to sound symbolic associations exists before 3 years of age but further develops during childhood (until at least 7 years of age), suggesting that basic sensitivity to sound symbolism is present early in life and facilitates children's word-referent mappings, while sensitivity to subtler sound symbolic cues requires greater exposure to the language environment (Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2017). Our conclusion also gives rise to the possibility that the bouba-type and kiki-type associations are not entirely equivalent, and have different underlying mechanisms.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Symbouki: a meta‐analysis on the emergence of sound symbolism in early language acquisition

Fort

Lammertink

Peperkamp

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

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Adults and toddlers systematically associate pseudowords such as "bouba" and "kiki" with round and spiky shapes, respectively, a sound symbolic phenomenon known as the "bouba-kiki effect". To date, whether this sound symbolic effect is a property of the infant brain present at birth or is a learned aspect of language perception remains unknown. Yet, solving this question is fundamental for our understanding of early language acquisition. Indeed, an early sensitivity to such sound symbolic associations could provide a powerful mechanism for language learning, playing a bootstrapping role in the establishment of novel sound-meaning associations. The aim of the present meta-analysis (SymBouKi) is to provide a quantitative overview of the emergence of the bouba-kiki effect in infancy and early childhood. It allows a high-powered assessment of the true sound symbolic effect size by pooling over the entire set of 11 extant studies (six published, five unpublished), entailing data from 425 participants between 4 and 38 months of age. The quantitative data provide statistical support for a moderate, but significant, sound symbolic effect. Further analysis found a greater sensitivity to sound symbolism for bouba-type pseudowords (i.e., round sound-shape correspondences) than for kiki-type pseudowords (i.e., spiky sound-shape correspondences). For the kiki-type pseudowords, the effect emerged with age. Such discrepancy challenges the view that sensitivity to sound symbolism is an innate language mechanism rooted in an exuberant interconnected brain. We propose alternative hypotheses where both innate and learned mechanisms are at play in the emergence of sensitivity to sound symbolic relationships.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Symbouki: a meta‐analysis on the emergence of sound symbolism in early language acquisition

Fort

Lammertink

Peperkamp

et al. 2018

Developmental Science

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“…Regardless of whether or not sound-symbolic CCs originate from aligned percepts across sensory modalities, having a motivated connection between words and meaning has been suggested to facilitate language learning. The pervasiveness of sound symbolism across languages supports the theory that it may have an important role in language learning (Imai et al, 2015;Kantartzis, Imai, & Kita S, 2011;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2017). Individuals are even able to correctly assign meanings of synonym/antonym pairs above chance for languages with which they are unfamiliar (Kunihara, 1971;Nygaard et al, 2009;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2016).…”

Section: Sound Symbolism In Language Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 61%

“…Sound symbolism has been demonstrated across different languages (Blasi et al, 2016), cultures (Chen et al, 2016;Kantartzis et al, 2011), and even with children of pre-reading age (Imai et al, 2015;Maurer et al, 2006;Ozturk et al, 2013;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2017). These studies show that the existence of sound-symbolic CCs in language is both prolific and robust.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 64%

“…On the one hand, sound-symbolic CCs provide a tool for children to acquire language by learning the meaning of individual words. Imai et al (2015) found that the sound structure of individual words bolstered children's abilities to learn the meaning of that word (see also Ozturk, et al, 2013;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2017). This theory is known as the bootstrapping hypothesis (Imai & Kita, 2014).…”

Section: Sound Symbolism In Language Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Soundsymbolic CCs also seem to play a role in language processing and early word learning (Imai & Kita, 2014). For example, individuals exhibit sensitivity to sound-symbolic crossmodal associations as early as four months of age (Ozturk et al, 2013), and recent studies have suggested that sound symbolism is important for specific word-to-meaning associations in young children with limited vocabularies (Gasser, 2004;Tzeng, Nygaard, & Namy, 2017). In adults, sound symbolism may offer linguistic processing advantages for categorization and word learning, particularly for larger vocabularies (Brand et al, 2018;Gasser, 2004;Revill et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Acoustic and Visual Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondences

Sm¹,

McCormick²,

Lacey

et al. 2019

Preprint

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It is often assumed that a fundamental property of language is the arbitrariness of the relationship between sound and meaning. Sound symbolism, which refers to non-arbitrary mapping between the sound of a word and its meaning, contradicts this assumption. Sensitivity to sound symbolism has been studied through crossmodal correspondences (CCs) between auditory pseudowords (e.g. 'loh-moh') and visual shapes (e.g. a blob). We used representational similarity analysis to examine the relationships between physical stimulus parameters and perceptual ratings that varied on dimensions of roundedness and pointedness, for a range of auditory pseudowords and visual shapes. We found that perceptual ratings of these stimuli relate to certain physical features of both the visual and auditory domains. Representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of parameters that capture the spatial profile of the visual shapes, such as the simple matching coefficient and Jaccard distance, were significantly correlated with those of the visual ratings. RDMs of certain acoustic parameters of the pseudowords, such as the temporal fast Fourier transform (FFT) and spectral tilt, that reflect spectral composition, as well as shimmer and speech envelope that reflect aspects of amplitude variation over time, were significantly correlated with those of the auditory perceptual ratings. RDMs of the temporal FFT (acoustic) and the simple matching coefficient (visual) were significantly correlated. These findings suggest that sound-symbolic CCs are related to basic properties of auditory and visual stimuli, and thus provide insights into the fundamental nature of sound symbolism and how this might evoke specific impressions of physical meaning in natural language.

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What makes a shape “baba”? The shape features prioritized in sound–shape correspondence change with development

Chow

Ciaramitaro

2019

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Developmental change in children’s sensitivity to sound symbolism

Cited by 28 publications

References 59 publications

Symbouki: a meta‐analysis on the emergence of sound symbolism in early language acquisition

Symbouki: a meta‐analysis on the emergence of sound symbolism in early language acquisition

Acoustic and Visual Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondences

What makes a shape “baba”? The shape features prioritized in sound–shape correspondence change with development

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