Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary

Wichmann, Søren; Holman, Eric W.; Brown, Cecil H.

doi:10.3390/e12040844

Cited by 70 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This potential is suggested by findings across languages that proximal versus distal distinctions, including first versus second person, tend to exhibit similar distinctive phonetic patterns (Tanz, 1971;Wichmann, 2010). Our results show further how vocalization could supply additional information about proximal (e.g., here, now, near, short) and distal (there, later, far, long) locations in space and time.…”

Section: Modality and The Nature Of Vocalization: Comparisons With Masupporting

confidence: 67%

“…(Dingemanse, Torreira, & Enfield, 2013). A more comprehensive survey looked for evidence of sound symbolism within 40 basic vocabulary words across 121 language families and 52 isolates and unclassified languages (Wichmann, Holman, & Brown, 2010). Overall these vocabulary items showed a correlation between the form of the words and their meaning, and in particular, meanings like breast, I, knee, you, nose, name, and we appear to have similar phonological forms across languages.…”

Section: Iconicity In Lexicon and Grammarmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Perlman

Cain

2014

GEST

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Modality and The Nature Of Vocalization: Comparisons With Masupporting

confidence: 67%

Section: Iconicity In Lexicon and Grammarmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Perlman

Cain

2014

GEST

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…At a more comprehensive level of description, corpus analyses involving samples from 118 language families have indicated that sound symbolism is embedded in the lexicons of a large number of natural languages (e.g. Ciccotosto, 1991;Wichmann, Holman, & Brown, 2010). Furthermore, Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, and Kirby (2014) have recently demonstrated that even when no a priori expectations are made about which sounds might be used to represent which meanings, monomorphemic words of English which share phonological properties also share semantic properties, and appear in similar linguistic contexts, at rates higher than would be predicted by chance.…”

Section: Sound Symbolism In the Lexicons Of Natural Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Balloons and bavoons versus spikes and shikes: ERPs reveal shared neural processes for shape–sound-meaning congruence in words, and shape–sound congruence in pseudowords

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…This would seem to suggest that the maluma/takete effect cannot be explained by language patterns. We described some other instances of indirect iconicity in the lexicon earlier in this paper, but the fact that many of these instances emerge across large samples of languages leads to the conclusion that they are the result of sound symbolism as opposed to the cause of it (e.g., Blasi et al, 2016;Wichmann, Holman, & Brown, 2010).…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary

Cited by 70 publications

References 12 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

Balloons and bavoons versus spikes and shikes: ERPs reveal shared neural processes for shape–sound-meaning congruence in words, and shape–sound congruence in pseudowords

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About