What makes a shape “baba”? The shape features prioritized in sound–shape correspondence change with development

Chow, Hiu Mei; Ciaramitaro, Vivian

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2018.10.005

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Items that are uniformly classified as ‘rounded’ from a phonetic perspective, such as /y/ and /u/—since both require lip rounding—end up at different ends of the sound-symbolic roundness-sharpness continuum (see for /y/ 42 and for /u/ 43 ). Sharp-sounding but phonetically ‘rounded’ /y/ violates the correspondence as do round-sounding but phonetically not-rounded / / and /a/ 43 , 44 . Therefore, lip rounding as a phonetic feature is not a reliable indicator of sound symbolic categorization.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Action sound–shape congruencies explain sound symbolism

Margiotoudi

Pulvermüller

2020

Sci Rep

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Sound symbolism, the surprising semantic relationship between meaningless pseudowords (e.g., 'maluma', 'takete') and abstract (round vs. sharp) shapes, is a hitherto unexplained human-specific knowledge domain. Here we explore whether abstract sound symbolic links can be explained by those between the sounds and shapes of bodily actions. To this end, we asked human subjects to match pseudowords with abstract shapes and, in a different experimental block, the sounds of actions with the shapes of the trajectories of the actions causing these same sounds. Crucially, both conditions were also crossed. Our findings reveal concordant matching in the sound symbolic and action domains, and, importantly, significant correlations between them. We conclude that the sound symbolic knowledge interlinking speech sounds and abstract shapes is explained by audiovisual information immanent to action experience along with acoustic similarities between speech and action sounds. These results demonstrate a fundamental role of action knowledge for abstract sound symbolism, which may have been key to human symbol-manipulation ability. Sound symbolism is an umbrella term that covers the non-arbitrary associations between meaningless speech sounds and sensory or other meanings 1 (for a review see 2). The iconic links between pseudowords and abstract visual shapes is the most popular demonstration of this phenomenon. In the present study, the term "sound symbolism" will refer to these latter associations. In his seminal book entitled "Gestalt Psychology", Köhler 3 described the classic "maluma-takete" paradigm in which humans match a round figure to a 'round' sounding pseudoword, such as "maluma", and a sharp figure to a 'sharp' sounding pseudoword such as "takete", thus presupposing an abstract 'resemblance' between the otherwise meaningless symbol (pseudoword) and the corresponding shape, possibly based on shared modality general abstract properties. Many experimental studies confirmed Köhler's example and demonstrated the postulated iconic speech-sound/meaning mappings across languages 4-6 , even at early age (for a meta-analysis see 7) and across stimulus modalities 8,9. Furthermore, the ability to perform well on sound symbolic tasks has been related to word learning capacity in young children 10-12. These results led to some skepticism towards the linguistic Saussurean 13 position that the relationship between form and meaning of signs is arbitrary and even suggest an important role of sound symbolic mechanisms in language development 14 and evolution 15. Specifically, vocal iconic mappings between infants' first spoken words and the referents these words are used to speak about appear to be substantial, so that iconic signs may have a special status for our ability to talk about things not present in the environment, a feature sometimes called 'displacement in communication' 6. Today, iconicity and sound symbolism along with their bootstrapping role in language development and evolution are widely upon agreement 15 , with recent e...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Action sound–shape congruencies explain sound symbolism

Margiotoudi

Pulvermüller

2020

Sci Rep

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“…Voiced labial stop [b], sonorants [m, l], and back round vowels [u, o] are consistently matched to curvy shapes; voiceless alveolar and velar stops [t, k], and front vowels [i, e] are consistently matched to spiky shapes (D'Onofrio, 2014;McCormick et al 2015;Nielsen & Rendall, 2013). The bouba-kiki effect has been documented across different cultures (Bremner et al, 2013;Styles & Gawne, 2017) and throughout development (Lockwood & Dingemanse, 2015;Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006)the relative importance of the involved stimulus properties can vary with culture (Chen, Huang, Woods, & Spence, 2016) and developmental stages (Chow & Ciaramitaro, 2019). It is also an instance of sound symbolism, i.e., a consistent, non-arbitrary relationship between phonetic and perceptual or semantic elements establishing sound-meaning association biases in language (Blasi, Wichmann, Hammarström, Stadler, & Christiansen, 2016;Sidhu & Pexman, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-modal correspondences in sine wave: Speech versus non-speech modes

Silva

Bellini-Leite

2019

Atten Percept Psychophys

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The present study aimed to investigate whether or not the so-called "bouba-kiki" effect is mediated by speech-specific representations. Sine-wave versions of naturally produced pseudowords were used as auditory stimuli in an implicit association task (IAT) and an explicit cross-modal matching (CMM) task to examine cross-modal shape-sound correspondences. A group of participants trained to hear the sine-wave stimuli as speech was compared to a group that heard them as non-speech sounds. Sound-shape correspondence effects were observed in both groups and tasks, indicating that speech-specific processing is not fundamental to the "bouba-kiki" phenomenon. Effects were similar across groups in the IAT, while in the CMM task the speechmode group showed a stronger effect compared with the non-speech group. This indicates that, while both tasks reflect auditoryvisual associations, only the CMM task is additionally sensitive to associations involving speech-specific representations.

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“…Our results, showing that the Bouba/Kiki effect is underpinned by perceptual grouping process, provides critical implications for the development and neural mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. Even though rudimentary forms of the Bouba/Kiki effect have been observed in early infancy (Ozturk et al, 2013; Pejovic & Molnar, 2017; Walker et al, 2010), the group-level consensus of this sound–shape mapping develops continuously until late childhood (Chow & Ciaramitaro, 2019; Tzeng et al, 2017). This protracted developmental trajectory should partly depend on the visual development of shape processing (e.g., Cribb et al, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global shape perception contributes to crossmodal correspondences.

Chen¹,

Huang²,

Spence³

2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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The Bouba/Kiki effect constitutes a classic sound–shape correspondence, with the meaningless sounds “Bouba” and “Kiki” being mapped onto smooth and spiky patterns, respectively. While it is commonly believed that the Bouba/Kiki effect is driven by the local rounded and angular features of a pattern, here we investigated the importance of an alternative level of visual processing—namely the global contours. We adopted compound radial frequency (RF) patterns and segmented them into convexities (outward curves) or concavities (inward curves). Note that convexities are more informative in terms of inferring the global contour than concavities. When the perceptual grouping of segments was facilitated by increasing their length, the grouping of convexities was more efficient than that of concavities as manifested by the closer matching judgments to the compound RF patterns. When we interfered with the perceptual grouping of segments by rotating each segment by 180°, the matching consensus of convexities was higher when they were presented in the original than in the reversed orientation. Hence, the Bouba/Kiki effect was susceptible to the factors modulating the perceptual grouping process going from segments to the global contour, suggesting that the Bouba/Kiki effect may occur at the global level of shape perception. Sound–shape correspondences would therefore seem to be expressed at multiple levels of information processing, furthering our understanding of the development, underpinning neural mechanisms, and applications of crossmodal correspondences.

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What makes a shape “baba”? The shape features prioritized in sound–shape correspondence change with development

Cited by 9 publications

References 50 publications

Action sound–shape congruencies explain sound symbolism

Action sound–shape congruencies explain sound symbolism

Cross-modal correspondences in sine wave: Speech versus non-speech modes

Global shape perception contributes to crossmodal correspondences.

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