15:00 - 16:30
Wed-A6-Talk VII-
Wed-Talk VII-
Room: A6
Chair/s:
Anita Körner
The term sound symbolism refers to the phenomenon that word form (e.g., the phonemes of which a word consists) and word meaning are non-arbitrarily related. For example, specific vowels have been shown to be associated with size, so that participants typically choose the word MIL (vs. MAL) to denote a small (vs. large) object (e.g., Sapir, 1929). Sound-symbolism has been shown across many of the world’s major spoken languages as well as many sign languages. The present symposium will comprise talks that span several research areas in sound symbolism, comparing different semantic dimensions, different languages, and different psychological processes. First, cross-linguistic similarities in the association between phonemes and valence (Talk 1, Körner) as well as cross-linguistic differences in sound symbolic associations for size (Talk 2, Ćwiek) will be discussed. Additionally, the contribution of articulatory compared to acoustic properties of phonemes are examined by showing that valence sound symbolism partially relies on articulation (Talk 1, Körner), while frequently, both articulatory and acoustic features interact (Talk 3, Winter). Lastly, different methods for examining sound symbolism in the lab are discussed with an emphasis on unrestricted tasks, such as asking participants to generate pseudo-words to prevent (Talk 4, Rummer). Together with the talks, the integrative discussion will facilitate a deeper understanding of how word form and meaning are related and which psychological processes drive sound symbolism. Ultimately, words reflect psychological functions and research on sound symbolism can reveal how the human mind uses ecological and psychological associations to represent meaning.
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The naming paradigm in sound symbolism research
Wed-A6-Talk VII-04
Presented by: Ralf Rummer
Ralf Rummer, Anita Körner, Larissa Röth
University of Kassel
Sound symbolism research uses mainly two types of empirical paradigms. First, corpus analyses examine whether there is an association between sub-lexical word features (e.g., phonemes) and meaning. Second, in pseudo-word experiments, participants see one or two artificially created words per trial and are asked to match these words to objects (e.g., the BOUBA-KIKI- or TAKETE-MALUMA-Effect). The present talk discusses the naming paradigm, which shares advantages with both the pseudo-word paradigm and corpus analyses. In this paradigm, participants are typically asked to listen to a short excerpt from an unfamiliar language and then invent pseudo-words that, subjectively, resembles words from the unfamiliar language. Participants are asked to invent one pseudo-word as a name for each of several objects. Hitherto, the naming paradigm has been employed mainly to examine valence sound symbolism. Exemplarily, we will report one of these valence sound experiments, which compares novel names for faces with positive and negative valence in native speakers of Japanese and German. We demonstrated that the vowel /i/ was associated to positive valence and the vowels /o/ and /u/ were associated to negative valence. The second experiment investigates the BOUBA-KIKI-effect. Here we observed that the names for spikey shapes included more frequently the letters T, and -surprisingly- S, Z and R and the names for round shapes included more frequently the letters L, O, M, B, and -surprisingly- H. We will argue that the naming paradigm has several advantages compared to the paradigms usually preferred in research on sound symbolism.
Keywords: Sound Symbolism, Iconicity, Language, Emotional Valence, Psycholinguistics
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