Note on Phonetic Symbolism

Abstract

1964) stated that his finding of a significant correlation berween S's guesses and the later learning of Spanish vocabulary items suggested some support for Taylor's phonetic symbolism hyporhesis, while a zero correlation of the same measure for Japanese and Russian tended to cancel confidence in the hyporhesis. This note examines the above statement and concludes that Asher's findings have only an indirect relevance either to phonetic symbolism or to Taylor's hypothesis. This note examines the following statement by Asher (1964) touching on Taylor's (1963) phonetic symbolism hypothesis:The finding of significant correlation berween S's guesses (as to the possible meaning of an unfamiliar Spanish utterance) and the later learning of the Spanish vocabulary items suggested some support for the notion of phonetic symbolism (Taylor, 1963). However, zero-correlation of the same measure for Japanese and Russian tended to cancel confidence in the hypothesis of phonetic symbolism.The above stacemenc seems to reflect some misunderstandings of Taylor's phonetic symbolism hypothesis.( 1 ) Does Asher imply that Taylor's hypothesis should help his Ss guess the vocabulary of any foreign language?Taylor rejected universal phonetic symbolism, proposing thac the phonetic symbolism pattern is different in each unrelated language system. The hypothesis predicted the degrees of similarity among phonetic symbolism patterns as a function of historical relatedness of the languages. Thus, Spanish and Russian, which belong to the same language family, Indo-European, as English, may have phonetic symbolism patterns more similar to English than does Japanese.( 2 ) Does Asher imply that his Ss should be able to gaess the meaning of foreign vocabulary with the help of universal phonetic symbolism? Taylor (1963) and Taylor and Taylor' extensively discuss the relation between guessing success in word-matching experiments and phonetic symbolism and conclude that guessing success depends on various other factors besides phonetic symbolism. For example, some of the factors considered were: ( a ) possible bias in determining which of the numerous alternative translations is chosen as the equivalent of the stim~ilus word; ( b ) structural similarities between the words to be guessed (e.g., word length); ( c ) how the results of guessing successes are reported.Thus, Asher's finding thac of the three foreign languages Spanish is most easily guessed by American college students may result from the facts that: ( a ) 'I. K. Taylor & M. M. Taylor. Another look at phonetic symbolism. (In preparation)