Sound symbolic naming of novel objects is a graded function

Abstract

Although linguistic traditions of the last century assumed that there is no link between sound and meaning (i.e., arbitrariness), recent research has established a nonarbitrary relation between sound and meaning (i.e., sound symbolism). For example, some sounds (e.g., /u/ as in took) suggest bigness whereas others (e.g., /i/ as in tiny) suggest smallness. We tested whether sound symbolism only marks contrasts (e.g., small versus big things) or whether it marks object properties in a graded manner (e.g., small, medium, and large things). In two experiments, participants viewed novel objects (i.e., greebles) of varying size and chose the most appropriate name for each object from a list of visually or auditorily presented nonwords that varied incrementally in the number of “large” and “small” phonemes. For instance, “wodolo” contains all large-sounding phonemes, whereas “kitete” contains all small-sounding phonemes. Participants' choices revealed a graded relationship between sound and size: The size of the object linearly predicted the number of large-sounding phonemes in its preferred name. That is, small, medium, and large objects elicited names with increasing numbers of large-sounding phonemes. The results are discussed in relation to cross-modal processing, gesture, and vocal pitch.

Keywords:

• Sound symbolism
• Cross-modal processing
• Iconism
• Naming
• Phonetic symbolism
• Statistical language learning

Acknowledgments

The first author's work was supported by the Warwick Postgraduate Fellowship. The authors are grateful to Lara Jones, Jeff Winking, Joao Fialho, and James Adelman for their helpful suggestions. The authors would also like to thank Sachiko Kinoshita and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

¹ Participants responded to 100 items but due to programmer error, three greeble sets (15 items) were removed from analyses.