The frequency code underlies the sound-symbolic use of voice pitch

Ohala, John J.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511751806.022

Cited by 350 publications

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“…Recall that a lower frequency implies larger objects (Ohala 1983b(Ohala , 1994. Cross-linguistically, vowels have lower F0 next to voiced obstruents than next to voiceless obstruents (see Kingston and Diehl 1994 among others).…”

Section: Voicing In Consonants: An Acoustic Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…tions based on the frequency code hypothesis (Ohala 1983b(Ohala , 1994see also Newman 1933;O'Boyle and Tarte 1980). This hypothesis builds on the correlation between the size of a resonator (or a resonating cavity) and its resulting frequency: lower frequencies imply large resonance cavities or resonators because the resonance frequency inversely correlates with its size.…”

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confidence: 99%

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A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

Shinohara¹,

Kawahara²

2010

BLS

130

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Although the sound-meaning relationship is often arbitrary (Saussure 1916), cases exist in which some sounds correspond to certain meanings. Such association between sounds and meanings is known as sound symbolism, and there has been a longstanding interest in the existence and the nature of sound symbolism. This paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that certain sound symbolisms hold robustly across languages. In particular, we investigate how the images of size (small or large) are affected by three phonetic factors: the height of vowels, the backness of vowels, and voicing in obstruents. Our rating experiment of four languages—Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean—shows that these three factors contribute to the images of size, with only a few exceptions. To explain the results, we offer phonetic grounding of these size-related sound symbolic patterns. We further raise the possibility that these phonetically grounded sound symbolic patterns are ‘embodied’ in the sense of Johnson (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999).

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Section: Voicing In Consonants: An Acoustic Explanationmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

Shinohara¹,

Kawahara²

2010

BLS

130

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“…Past research on sound symbolism has focused on two aspects: the range of the effect (i.e., its universality; Huang, Pratoomaraj, and Johnson 1969) and the aspects of meaning it affects (Klink 2000(Klink , 2001Ohala 1994). Less is known about the sound symbolism process itself.…”

Section: Eric Yorkston Geeta Menon*mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The authors acknowledge the data collection assistance provided by Sucharita Chandran, Andrea Morales, and Manoj Thomas. In addition, the authors are especially grateful to the JCR editors, Dawn Iacobucci and David Mick, the associate editor, and three reviewers for their constructive feedback during the review process.Past research on sound symbolism has focused on two aspects: the range of the effect (i.e., its universality; Huang, Pratoomaraj, and Johnson 1969) and the aspects of meaning it affects (Klink 2000(Klink , 2001Ohala 1994). Less is known about the sound symbolism process itself.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Sound Idea: Phonetic Effects of Brand Names on Consumer Judgments

Yorkston¹,

Menon²

2004

J Consum Res

319

302

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In this article we examine a phenomenon known as sound symbolism, where the sound of a word conveys meanings. Specifically, brand names are composed of individual sounds called phonemes and we investigate how this phonetic structure of brand names affects a consumer's evaluation of products and their underlying attributes. We demonstrate that consumers use information they gather from phonemes in brand names to infer product attributes and to evaluate brands. We also demonstrate that the manner in which phonetic effects of brand names manifest is automatic in as much as it is uncontrollable, outside awareness and effortless.S ound symbolism, the linguistic process in which the sounds of a word provide cues about the word's meaning, is not a new phenomenon. Plato first described the effect in the dialogues of Cratylus, and authors throughout time have used the sounds in words to describe people (e.g., the miniature Lilliputians and the giant Brobdingnagians in Swift's Gulliver's Travels) and objects (e.g., the large, dangerous Bludgers, the big, round Quaffle, and the small, fast Golden Snitch in the Quidditch game in Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) represented by those words. When presented with fictitious or unfamiliar words, individuals consistently use sound symbolism to interpret meanings from the name about the referenced object (Jacobson and Waugh 1987;Sapir 1929). The effect is extremely well documented whether the tested individual's native language is English (Klink 2000(Klink , 2001, Chinese (Klank, Huang, and Johnson 1971;Lapolla 1994), or even Navajo (Sapir 1929). In fact, sound symbolism has been observed to exist in native languages in North America, Latin America, Asia, Australia, and Africa, as well as more developed languages such as English, Finnish, French, German, Modern Greek, and Japanese (for a complete discussion of these examples see Hinton, Nichols, and Ohala 1994). *Eric Yorkston is assistant professor of marketing, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0443 (e-mail: yorkston@marshall .usc.edu). Geeta Menon is Harold MacDowell Faculty Fellow and associate professor of marketing, New York University, New York, NY 10012-1126 (e-mail: gmenon@stern.nyu.edu). This article is based on the doctoral dissertation of the first author under the supervision of the second. The authors thank members of the dissertation committee, Adamantios Gafos, Eric Greenleaf, and Vicki Morwitz, for their helpful comments during the different stages of this project. The authors acknowledge the data collection assistance provided by Sucharita Chandran, Andrea Morales, and Manoj Thomas. In addition, the authors are especially grateful to the JCR editors, Dawn Iacobucci and David Mick, the associate editor, and three reviewers for their constructive feedback during the review process.Past research on sound symbolism has focused on two aspects: the range of the effect (i.e., its universality; Huang, Pratoomaraj, and Johnson 1969) and the aspects of meaning it affects (Klink 2000(Kl...

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“…As noted by John Ohala [1], much of the literature on sound symbolism which attempts to make cross-linguistic generalizations is of an anecdotal character. In this paper we present a systematic OPEN ACCESS investigation of the words for a small but consistent set of concepts in a database [2] that includes almost half of the world's languages as defined in [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary

Wichmann

Holman

Brown

2010

Entropy

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Abstract:The relationship between meanings of words and their sound shapes is to a large extent arbitrary, but it is well known that languages exhibit sound symbolism effects violating arbitrariness. Evidence for sound symbolism is typically anecdotal, however. Here we present a systematic approach. Using a selection of basic vocabulary in nearly one half of the world's languages we find commonalities among sound shapes for words referring to same concepts. These are interpreted as due to sound symbolism. Studying the effects of sound symbolism cross-linguistically is of key importance for the understanding of language evolution.

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The frequency code underlies the sound-symbolic use of voice pitch

Cited by 350 publications

References 0 publications

A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

A Cross-linguistic Study of Sound Symbolism: The Images of Size

A Sound Idea: Phonetic Effects of Brand Names on Consumer Judgments

Sound Symbolism in Basic Vocabulary

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