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

Abstract

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of the true sound symbolic effect size by pooling over the entire set of 11 extant studies (six published, five unpublished), entailing data from 425 participants between 4 and 38 months of age.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.

Natural reference: A phylo‐ and ontogenetic perspective on the comprehension of iconic gestures and vocalizations

“…() and Fort et al. (), our results therefore question the interpretation that sound‐symbolic or onomatopoetic words offer children with “a nascent representation of the word meaning without effort” (Imai & Kita, ).…”

“…While vocalizations contributed to comprehension when combined with gestures, at least for 24-month-olds, we did not find any evidence that vocalization alone allowed children to spontaneously identify the referent. Together with the findings by Laing et al (2017) and Fort et al (2018), our results therefore question the interpretation that sound-symbolic or onomatopoetic words offer children with "a nascent representation of the word meaning without effort" (Imai & Kita, 2014).…”

What’s in a looking time preference?

“…The other were meta-analyses of statistical sound category learning (Cristia, 2018), phonotactic learning (Cristia, 2018), infant sound symbolism (Fort, Lammertink, Peperkamp, Guevara-Rukoz, Fikkert, & Tsuji, 2018), and word segmentation (Bergmann & Cristia, 2016).…”

Sound Symbolism Facilitates Long-Term Retention of the Semantic Representation of Novel Verbs in Three-Year-Olds

“…When asked to match rounded and angular objects to two novel words, maluma and takete, a large majority of adults from different linguistic backgrounds pick takete for the angular object and maluma for the rounded object (e.g., Davis 1961;Holland and Wertheimer 1964). Shape sound symbolism can also be recognized by children (Asano et al 2015;Imai et al 2015;Maurer et al 2006; see Fort et al 2013 andFort et al 2018 for an extensive review on shape sound symbolism in infants and toddlers). Sound symbolism has also been shown in size, for example, with words containing /i/ being assigned to smaller objects and those containing /a/ being assigned to larger objects (Sapir 1929).…”