Phonetic Correlates of Sound Symbolism Público
Mathur, Nihar Mohan (2010)
Published
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
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