Is sound symbolism an affordance? Public
Michelini, Leonardo (Summer 2022)
Published
Abstract
Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary link between word and meaning. Over the last decades, studies have emphasized the ubiquity of this phenomenon in language and argued that it is an important factor in understanding language evolution and development. However, precisely characterizing the role that sound symbolism plays and how it is situated within the broader communicative system has been a difficult task. Researchers have tentatively proposed that sound symbolism can be understood as an affordance, but this notion remains underexplored. Thus, this investigation is chiefly concerned with fleshing out this hypothesis and testing it empirically. If sound symbolism is understood as a communicative tool that facilitates linguistic and perceptual processing, this functional purpose could be interpreted as an affordance that constrains the range of sound-to-meaning mappings. Alternatively, sound symbolism itself could be considered an affordance for iconic representation in prosody (e.g., depicting the size of the referent using tone of voice). A preliminary experiment was conducted to determine whether our materials, animal images and pseudowords, evoked the predicted size magnitude. A second experiment assessed whether participants would assign labels to complex objects based on shared size similarities between the two. Finally, the third experiment examined whether sound-symbolic word-referent pairs would elicit stronger prosodic modulation compared to pairs that were not. We found evidence that sound-to-meaning mappings were driven by affordances in experiment 2. However, the results from experiment 3 were largely inconclusive, and thus the status of the affordance hypothesis in the realm of prosody is still uncertain.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
The protean nature of iconicity 3
Affordances 5
Affordances of the articulators 5
Affordances of word-referent pairs 6
Affordances of the multimodal communicative system 9
The present study 11
Experiments 1a and 1b 13
Participants 14
Stimuli 14
Procedure 16
Results and Discussion 17
Experiment 2 24
Participants 24
Stimuli 24
Procedure 25
Results and Discussion 25
Experiment 3 29
Participants 30
Stimuli 30
Procedure 31
Results and Discussion 32
General discussion 36
Appendix 40
References 44
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