The audiovisual structure of onomatopoeias: An intrusion of real-world physics in lexical creation.

ABSTRACT: Sound-symbolic word classes are found in different cultures and languages worldwide. These words are continuously produced to code complex information about events. Here we explore the capacity of creative language to transport complex multisensory information in a controlled experiment, where our participants improvised onomatopoeias from noisy moving objects in audio, visual and audiovisual formats. We found that consonants communicate movement types (slide, hit or ring) mainly through the manner of articulation in the vocal tract. Vowels communicate shapes in visual stimuli (spiky or rounded) and sound frequencies in auditory stimuli through the configuration of the lips and tongue. A machine learning model was trained to classify movement types and used to validate generalizations of o

SUBMITTER: Taitz A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5862436 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature