The Specificity of Sound Symbolic Correspondences in Spoken Language.

ABSTRACT: Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, sound symbolism, or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specificity of these mappings. This study investigated whether sound symbolic properties correspond to specific meanings, or whether these properties generalize across semantic dimensions. In three experiments, native English-speaking adults heard sound symbolic foreign words for dimensional adjective pairs (big/small, round/pointy, fast/slow, moving/still) and for each foreign word, selected a translation among English antonyms that either matched or mismatched with the correct mea

SUBMITTER: Tzeng CY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5491383 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature