Evidence for pervasive synesthetic sound symbolism in ethnozoological nomenclature

Hinton, Leanne; Nichols, Johanna; Ohala, John J.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511751806.006

Cited by 60 publications

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“…Berlin, 1994;Imai et al, 2008). The bouba-kiki studies reviewed in this paper have played an important role in revitalising interest in the question of arbitrariness in language (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect

Cuskley

Simner

Kirby

2015

Psychological Research

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Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba-kiki effectArticle (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Cuskley, Christine, Simner, Julia and Kirby, Simon (2015) Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba-kiki effect. Psychological This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/63979/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Abstract We examine a high-profile phenomenon known as the bouba-kiki effect, in which non-word names are assigned to abstract shapes in systematic ways (e.g. rounded shapes are preferentially labelled bouba over kiki). In a detailed evaluation of the literature, we show that most accounts of the effect point to predominantly or entirely iconic cross-sensory mappings between acoustic or articulatory properties of sound and shape as the mechanism underlying the effect. However, these accounts have tended to confound the acoustic or articulatory properties of nonwords with another fundamental property: their written form. We compare traditional accounts of direct audio or articulatory-visual mapping with an account in which the effect is heavily influenced by matching between the shapes of graphemes and the abstract shape targets. The results of our two studies suggest that the dominant mechanism underlying the effect for literate subjects is matching based on aligning letter curvature and shape roundedness (i.e. non-words with curved letters are matched to round shapes). We show that letter curvature is strong enough to significantly influence word-shape associations even in auditory tasks, where written word forms are never presented to participants. However, we also find an additional phonological influence in that voiced sounds are preferentially linked with rounded shapes, although this arises only in a purely auditory word-shape association task. We conclude that many previous investigations of the bouba-kiki effect may not have given appropriate consideration or weight to the influenc...

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“…Berlin, 1994;Imai et al, 2008). The bouba-kiki studies reviewed in this paper have played an important role in revitalising interest in the question of arbitrariness in language (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect

Cuskley

Simner

Kirby

2015

Psychological Research

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“…In addition, Blasi, Wichmann, Hammarström, Stadler and Christiansen (2016) compared the forms of 100 basic terms across 4,298 languages and found, in addition to other patterns, that words for the concept small tended to include the high-front vowel /i/. Cross-linguistic studies have also reported evidence of indirect iconicity in, among other things, proximity terms (e.g., Johansson & Zlatev, 2013;Tanz, 1971), singular versus plural markers (Ultan, 1978), and animal names (Berlin, 1994). Additionally, the ability of individuals to guess the meanings of foreign antonyms at an above chance rate (e.g., Bankieris & Simner, 2015;Brown, Black, & Horowitz, 1955;Klank, Huang, & Johnson, 1971) has been attributed to indirect iconicity.…”

Section: Arbitrariness and Nonarbitrarinessmentioning

confidence: 93%

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

2017

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Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (e.g., objects of a certain size or shape). Some of the best-known examples include the mil/mal effect (Sapir, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239, 1929) and the maluma/takete effect (Köhler, 1929). Interest in this topic has been on the rise within psychology, and studies have demonstrated that sound symbolic effects are relevant for many facets of cognition, including language, action, memory, and categorization. Sound symbolism also provides a mechanism by which words' forms can have nonarbitrary, iconic relationships with their meanings. Although various proposals have been put forth for how phonetic features (both acoustic and articulatory) come to be associated with stimuli, there is as yet no generally agreed-upon explanation. We review five proposals: statistical co-occurrence between phonetic features and associated stimuli in the environment, a shared property among phonetic features and stimuli; neural factors; species-general, evolved associations; and patterns extracted from language. We identify a number of outstanding questions that need to be addressed on this topic and suggest next steps for the field.

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“…at above chance levels for words in Albanian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Gujarati, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Romanian, Tahitian Tamil, Turkish, and Yoruba (Brown, Black, & Horowitz, 1955;Clepper, Nygaard, & Namy, 2011;Klank, Huang, & Johnson, 1971, Kunihira, 1971. In addition, Berlin (1994) showed that native English speakers, presented with a list of bird and fish names in the Peruvian language Huambisa, were able to correctly guess which were bird names at higher-than-chance levels. An acoustic analysis revealed that bird names were characterized by high frequency speech sounds whereas fish names were characterized by lower frequencies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound symbolism in synesthesia: Evidence from a lexical–gustatory synesthete

Bankieris¹,

Simner²

2013

Neurocase

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Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Bankieris, Kaitlyn and Simner, Julia (2013) Sound symbolism in synesthesia: evidence from a lexical-gustatory synesthete. Neurocase, 20 (6). pp. 640-651. ISSN 1355-4794 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/57043/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. AbstractSynaesthesia is a condition in which perceptual or cognitive stimuli (e.g., a written letter) trigger atypical additional percepts (e.g., the colour yellow). Although these cross-modal pairings appear idiosyncratic in that they superficially differ from synaesthete to synaesthete, underlying patterns do exist and these can, in some circumstances, reflect the cross-modal intuitions of nonsynaesthetes (e.g., higher pitch sounds tend to be 'seen' in lighter colours by synaesthetes, and are also paired to lighter colours by nonsynaesthetes in cross-modal matching tasks). We recently showed that grapheme-colour synaesthetes are more sensitive to sound symbolism (i.e., crossmodal sound-meaning correspondences) in natural language compared to nonsynaesthetes (Bankieris & Simner, 2012). Accordingly, we hypothesize that sound symbolism may be a guiding force in synaesthesia, to dictate what types of synaesthetic experiences are triggered by words. We tested this hypothesis by examining the cross-modal mappings of lexical-gustatory synaesthete, JIW, for whom words trigger flavour experiences. We show that certain phonological features (e.g., front vowels) systematically trigger particular categories of taste (e.g., bitter) in his synaesthesia. Some of these associations agree with sound symbolic patterns in natural language.

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Evidence for pervasive synesthetic sound symbolism in ethnozoological nomenclature

Cited by 60 publications

References 0 publications

Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect

Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

Sound symbolism in synesthesia: Evidence from a lexical–gustatory synesthete

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