Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages

Winter, Bodo; Sóskuthy, Márton; Perlman, Marcus; Dingemanse, Mark

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-04311-7

Cited by 31 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…For example, data-driven approaches (e.g. Wichmann et al 2010;Blasi et al 2016;Joo 2020;Johansson et al 2020;Winter et al 2022) use comparisons across unrelated languages to identify form-meaning correspondences that occur at rates higher than chance. This requires large amounts of parallel data from distinct phyla, and existing studies usually focus on basic vocabulary-where such data is most readily available.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two measures are better than one: Combining iconicity ratings and guessing experiments for a more nuanced picture of iconicity in the lexicon

McLean¹,

Dunn²,

Dingemanse³

2022

Preprint

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Iconicity in language is receiving increased attention from many fields, but our understanding of the roles of iconicity in language is only as good as the measures we use to quantify it. We conducted iconicity rating and guessing experiments with 304 Japanese ideophones and prosaic words with sensory meanings, e.g. fuwafuwa ‘fluffy’, jawarakai ‘soft’. For both word groups, ratings and guesses were positively correlated—suggesting the two measures pick up on the same associations. Ideophones were consistently associated with higher iconicity ratings, but not higher guessing accuracy. We suggest that the structural markedness of ideophones enhances their perceived iconicity in the rating task, but does not provide any advantage (over and above form-meaning associations) in the guessing task. Thus, guesses and ratings could be used together to tease apart the relative contribution of structural markedness to iconic effects. Some ideophones were also poorly guessed, highlighting that construals of iconicity can be language-specific. Finally, we present some methodological contributions, including a new guessing paradigm that improves on the robustness, sensitivity and discriminability of previous approaches, and a reproducible workflow for creating rating and guessing experiments with a Python package, icotools, which we hope will improve comparability between future studies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two measures are better than one: Combining iconicity ratings and guessing experiments for a more nuanced picture of iconicity in the lexicon

McLean¹,

Dunn²,

Dingemanse³

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…For example, syllabic or lexical reduplication often indicates repeated events, and changing vowel length is associated with the duration of an action (see Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015 for an overview). Moreover some phonemes consistently appear cross-linguistically in words representing specific concepts (e.g., /r/ for rough textures; Winter, Sóskuthy, & Perlman, 2017). What is represented iconically in a language may be shaped by language modality.…”

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confidence: 99%

Degree and not type of iconicity affects sign language vocabulary acquisition.

Caselli¹,

Pyers²

2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Lexical iconicity-signs or words that resemble their meaning-is overrepresented in children's early vocabularies. Embodied theories of language acquisition predict that symbols are more learnable when they are grounded in a child's firsthand experiences. As such, pantomimic iconic signs, which use the signer's body to represent a body, might be more readily learned than other types of iconic signs. Alternatively, the structure mapping theory of iconicity predicts that learners are sensitive to the amount of overlap between form and meaning. In this exploratory study of early vocabulary development in American Sign Language (ASL), we asked whether type of iconicity predicts sign acquisition above and beyond degree of iconicity. We also controlled for concreteness and relevance to babies, two possible confounding factors. Highly concrete referents and concepts that are germane to babies may be amenable to iconic mappings. We reanalyzed a previously published set of ASL Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) reports from 58 deaf children learning ASL from their deaf parents (Anderson & Reilly, 2002). Pantomimic signs were more iconic than other types of iconic signs (perceptual, both pantomimic and perceptual, or arbitrary), but type of iconicity had no effect on acquisition. Children may not make use of the special status of pantomimic elements of signs. Their vocabularies are, however, shaped by degree of iconicity, which aligns with a structure mapping theory of iconicity, though other explanations are also compatible (e.g., iconicity in child-directed signing). Previously demonstrated effects of type of iconicity may be an artifact of the increased degree of iconicity among pantomimic signs.

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“…Finally, in the Section 5, 'Discussion and conclusions', we suggest that care should be taken when taking the symbol r at face value in grammars, databases and other linguistic resources without further clarification. As a corollary, our findings might signal the need to re-evaluate already published research concerning the frequency of the alveolar trill within and between languages (Maddieson 1984), its areal and genealogical patterning, and the forces influencing these patterns (Moran, Lester & Grossman 2021), its acquisition (McLeod & Crowe 2018, Stemberger & Bernhardt 2018 and its extra-linguistic associations (Winter et al 2022), among others. However, we emphasize that our work should not be taken as negative, but as a positive, constructive contribution to the establishment of clearer transcription guidelines, ensuring a better consistency between large cross-linguistic databases, and promoting the use of statistical methods that better handle the ambiguity of most existing resources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 67%

What’s in the r? A review of the usage of the r symbol in the Illustrations of the IPA

Anselme¹,

Pellegrino²,

Dediu³

2023

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

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What does the symbol r mean when it is used in a transcription? Here we analyze the use of the symbols for the alveolar trills (r) and taps ( ) among the Illustrations of the IPA since 1971. We begin by sketching the history of the various symbols and conventions used to represent the trill and the tap in two transcription traditions: the Americanist Transcription System and the International Phonetic Alphabet. From the 213 languages covered until 2021, we carefully analyze the 162 that have trills and/or taps, using the information provided in Illustrations. Our results show that r tends to be used to represent a generic ‘r-like’ sound in both transcription traditions. More precisely, by comparing the use of r in the consonant tables and in the transcriptions of their accompanying narrative texts, we show that r is not systematically associated with an alveolar trill. Furthermore, we show that phonetic trills are less frequent than phonetic taps, while phonemic trills are more frequent than phonemic taps. As a consequence, inferring the presence of trilling in a sound system from the presence of r in its transcription is not as straightforward as one might expect. These findings highlight the critical importance of being absolutely explicit about the meaning of the various symbols found in grammars and secondary databases, and of r in particular, as a preliminary step in a broad range of studies, including cross-linguistic comparisons, inferences about the past or generalizations about language acquisition and articulatory effort.

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Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages

Cited by 31 publications

References 64 publications

Two measures are better than one: Combining iconicity ratings and guessing experiments for a more nuanced picture of iconicity in the lexicon

Two measures are better than one: Combining iconicity ratings and guessing experiments for a more nuanced picture of iconicity in the lexicon

Degree and not type of iconicity affects sign language vocabulary acquisition.

What’s in the r? A review of the usage of the r symbol in the Illustrations of the IPA

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