Phonetic Correlates of Sound Symbolism Open Access

Abstract

Abstract
Phonetic Correlates of Sound Symbolism
By Nihar M. Mathur

The sound structure of spoken language is widely assumed to bear an exclusively
arbitrary relationship to meaning. However, recent research into sound symbolism has
shown that listeners are sensitive to sound-to-meaning correspondences that appear to
occur cross-linguistically. The current study evaluated potential correspondences
between inventories of certain types of phonemes and particular semantic domains.
Antonyms from different semantic domains were recorded from native speakers of ten
different languages. Participants with no prior knowledge of the languages were
presented with the sets of antonyms and asked to guess their meanings. Broad phonetic
transcriptions of words referring to size (big/small), contour (round/pointy), motion
(fast/slow), speed (still/moving), and valence (bad/good) were analyzed to determine if
the phonemic profiles would differ as a function of meaning. In general, vowel height
and consonant voicing distinguished words sounding big from small, vowel roundedness
and the amount of vowels distinguished words sounding round from pointy, vowel height
distinguished words sounding still from moving, and vowel height, vowel roundedness,
and consonant sonority distinguished words sounding slow from fast. No significant
differences seemed to cue listeners to distinguish words sounding bad from good,
however. These findings illustrate a reliable sensitivity to the mapping of certain speech
sounds to certain semantic domains.
Keywords: sound symbolism, phonetic symbolism, arbitrariness, cross-modality

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Introduction…………………..…………………………………………………………...…1
Method
Corpus Preparation….……………….………………………………………...…....15
Behavioral Ratings….…………………………………………………...………......16
Broad Phonetic Transcription………………………………………………....….18
Results
Simple Correlations………………………………………..…………………….......21
Multiple Regression……………………………………………..………......……….22
Summary of Results…………………………………………………….......……….25
General Discussion…………………………………………………….…………………25
References…………………………………………………………………...……………..36
Table 1: Numbers of nominated synonyms broken down by adjective pair and
language.……………………………………………………………………..........…....39
Table 2: Vowel feature categories for vowel height, vowel backness, and vowel
roundedness.......................................................................40
Table 3: Consonant feature categorization of phones for place of articulation (PoA),
manner of articulation (MoA), and voicing.………………...……..……...41
Table 4: Simple Pearson correlation between phonetic correlates and listener
judgments.………………………………………...……………………………............42
Table 5: Multiple regression of behavioral ratings on phonological
features.……………………………………………………………...……..........……...43
Figure 1: Adapted from Köhler's (1947) original visual stimuli…..44

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Linguistics
Degree	BA
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Language, Linguistics Psychology, Cognitive Language, General
Keyword	arbitrariness cross-modality phonetic symbolism sound symbolism
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Nygaard, Lynne, Emory University
Committee Members	Weinschenk, Matthew, Emory University Tamasi, Susan L, Emory University Namy, Laura, Emory University

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