Inanimate imitatives in English

Oswalt, Robert L.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511751806.020

Cited by 36 publications

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“…In English, for example, Rhodes (1994) documents a repertoire of over 100 words used to express what he describes as aural images -"click", "blabber", "hoot", "ring", "splash", "whoosh", etc. And as Oswalt (1994) points out, English sound words include a large repertoire for inanimate sounds as well as animate ones.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Perlman

Cain

2014

GEST

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Scholars have often reasoned that vocalizations are extremely limited in their potential for iconic expression, especially in comparison to manual gestures (e.g., Armstrong & Wilcox, 2007;Tomasello, 2008). As evidence for an alternative view, we first review the growing body of research related to iconicity in vocalizations, including experimental work on sound symbolism, cross-linguistic studies documenting iconicity in the grammars and lexicons of languages, and experimental studies that examine iconicity in the production of speech and vocalizations. We then report an experiment in which participants created vocalizations to communicate 60 different meanings, including 30 antonymic pairs. The vocalizations were measured along several acoustic properties, and these properties were compared between antonyms. Participants were highly consistent in the kinds of sounds they produced for the majority of meanings, supporting the hypothesis that vocalization has considerable potential for iconicity. In light of these findings, we present a comparison between vocalization and manual gesture, and examine the detailed ways in which each modality can function in the iconic expression of particular kinds of meanings. We further discuss the role of iconic vocalizations and gesture in the evolution of language since our divergence from the great apes. In conclusion, we suggest that human communication is best understood as an ensemble of kinesis and vocalization, not just speech, in which expression in both modalities spans the range from arbitrary to iconic.

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confidence: 99%

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

Perlman

Cain

2014

GEST

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“…stops are used to imitate abrupt sounds or actions (pop, tap, tick, bop), nasals often imitate ringing (ding-dong), fricatives -quick audible motion and air turbulence (whizz, puff, shush, hush, continuants -lasting acts and strong swift movement (swoosh, whoosh) (cf. Oswalt 2006).…”

Section: Sound Symbolic Strategies and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound Symbolism in Foreign Language Phonological Acquisition

Wrembel

2010

RiL

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Sound Symbolism in Foreign Language Phonological Acquisition The paper aims at investigating the idea of a symbolic nature of sounds and its implications for in the acquisition of foreign language phonology. Firstly, it will present an overview of universal trends in phonetic symbolism, i.e. non-arbitrary representations of a phoneme by specific semantic criteria. Secondly, the results of a preliminary study on different manifestations of sound symbolism including emotionally-loaded representations of phonemes and other synaesthetic associations shall be discussed. Finally, practical pedagogical implications of sound symbolism will be explored and a number of innovative classroom activities involving sound symbolic associations will be presented.

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“…The sound symbolism of onomatopoeias has been studied for several languages (Oswalt, 1994;Patel & Iversen, 2003;Rhodes, 1994;Sobkowiak, 1990;Zuchowski, 1998). In particular, Japanese onomatopoeias have been much studied.…”

Section: Vocal Imitations As a Methods To Assess Sound Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vocal Imitations and the Identification of Sound Events

Lemaître

Dessein

Susini

et al. 2011

Ecological Psychology

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It is commonly observed that a speaker vocally imitates a sound that she or he intends to communicate to an interlocutor. We report on an experiment that examined the assumption that vocal imitations can effectively communicate a referent sound and that they do so by conveying the features necessary for the identification of the referent sound event. Participants were required to sort a set of vocal imitations of everyday sounds. The resulting clusters corresponded in most of the cases to the categories of the referent sound events, indicating that the imitations enabled the listeners to recover what was imitated. Furthermore, a binary decision tree analysis showed that a few characteristic acoustic features predicted the clusters. These features also predicted the classification of the referent sounds but did not generalize to the categorization of other sounds. This showed that, for the speaker, vocally imitating a sound consists of conveying the acoustic features important for recognition, within the constraints of human vocal production. As such vocal imitations prove to be a phenomenon potentially useful to study sound identification.

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Inanimate imitatives in English

Cited by 36 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Sound Symbolism in Foreign Language Phonological Acquisition

Vocal Imitations and the Identification of Sound Events

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