Some experimental evidence for sound–emotion interaction

This dissertation examines systematic sound-meaning correspondences in sound-symbolic words from a cross-linguistic perspective, investigating whether and to what degree they are naturally motivated. Its aims are to assess empirical evidence for the Explanatory Sound-symbolism Hypothesis (ESH): that sound symbolism is primarily governed by natural motivation, in particular, by a connection between human perceptual and language systems. The languages examined are Korean and English, which are genealogically unrelated.

Cognition, 2018

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2020

Languages contain thousands of words each and are made up by a seemingly endless collection of sound combinations. Yet a subsection of these show clear signs of corresponding word shapes for the same meanings which is generally known as vocal iconicity and sound symbolism. This dissertation explores the boundaries of sound symbolism in the lexicon from typological, functional and evolutionary perspectives in an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the role sound symbolism plays in human language. In order to achieve this, the subject in question was triangulated by investigating different methodologies which included lexical data from a large number of language families, experiment participants and robust statistical tests.Study I investigates basic vocabulary items in a large number of language families in order to establish the extent of sound symbolic items in the core of the lexicon, as well as how the sound-meaning associations are mapped and interconnected. This study ...

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 2016

We investigate the relation between general affective meaning and the use of particular phonological segments in poems, presenting a novel quantitative measure to assess the basic affective tone of a text based on foregrounded phonological units and their iconic affective properties. The novel method is applied to the volume of German poems "verteidigung der wölfe" (defense of the wolves) by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who categorized these 57 poems as friendly, sad, or spiteful. Our approach examines the relation between the phonological inventory of the texts to both the author's affective categorization and readers' perception of the poems-assessed by a survey study. Categorical comparisons of basic affective tone reveal significant differences between the 3 groups of poems in accordance with the labels given by the author as well as with the affective rating scores given by readers. Using multiple regression, we show our sublexical measures of basic affective tone to account for a considerable part of variance (9.5%Ϫ20%) of ratings on different emotion scales. We interpret this finding as evidence that the iconic properties of foregrounded phonological units contribute significantly to the poems' emotional perception-potentially reflecting an intentional use of phonology by the author. Our approach represents a first independent statistical quantification of the basic affective tone of texts.

Psychological Science, 2020

The sound of a word does not typically tell us what it means (De Saussure, 1916). A growing body of work, however, has shown that the sounds of words can carry subtle cues about what they refer to (for reviews, see Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015; Perniss, Thompson, & Vigliocco, 2010). One of the first studies to demonstrate the existence of nonarbitrary mappings between sound and meaning was conducted by Köhler (1929/1947), in which participants displayed a reliable preference to match the pseudoword takete with a spiky angular shape and the pseudoword maluma with a curvy rounded shape (see Fig. 1, top). Using different stimuli pairs, numerous studies have extended this finding, showing the existence of similar preferences across speakers from diverse linguistic backgrounds (e.g., Bremner et al., 2013; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001) as well as in 4-month-old infants (Ozturk, Krehm, & Vouloumanos, 2013). Among these studies, the stimuli pairs bouba and kiki used by Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) have become so prominent that this sound-shape preference is now often referred to as the "bouba-kiki effect" (see Fig. 1, middle). However, nearly a century after Köhler's (1929/1947) initial study, and despite the increasing number of studies investigating the bouba-kiki effect, little is known about the cognitive processes underlying this phenomenon. Previous investigations into the source of this effect have yielded a variety of explanations, including orthographical influences (i.e., matching on the basis of aligning letter curvature and shape roundedness; Cuskley, Simner, & Kirby, 2017), the co-occurrence of certain shapes with certain sounds in the natural environment (Spence, 2011), and the possible "cross-wiring" 927967P SSXXX10.

Iconicity: East Meets West, 2015

This paper reports results from an empirical study in synaesthetic sound iconic-ity, a specific form of phonosemantics defined as implicit and systematic associations of acoustic features of phonemes with non-acoustic phenomena. I argue that acoustic features of phonemes are implicitly associated with one pole or the other (e.g., high level or low level) of bipolar semantic concepts such as activity or dominance. Based on this assumption, it was hypothesized that pseudo-words consisting of plosive consonants and back vowels are associated with the emotion of anger, whereas pseudo-words consisting of sonorant consonants and front vowels are associated with the emotion of fear. This hypothesis was tested in an experimental setting, applying a speeded classification paradigm.

ExLing 2010: Proceedings of 3rd Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics,, 2019

The objective of this paper is to examine specific uses of sound symbolism concerning segmental and prosodic properties. The typology developed by Hilton et al (2004) is taken as reference. The corpus of this work is a poem recorded by a professional actor. A research methodology comprising prosodic perceptual analysis, prosodic acoustic analysis and affective states evaluation tests is proposed. The results indicate the speaking strategies used by the actor have been found to make use of three types of sound symbolism (synesthesic, imitative and metalinguistic). Correlations among acoustic properties, perceived affective states and text meaning production demonstrate productive use of sound symbolism and corroborate the discussion on the direct links between sound and meaning.

2019

We tested the hypothesis that phonosemantic iconicity-i.e., a motivated resonance of sound and meaning-might not only be found on the level of individual words or entire texts, but also in word combinations such that the meaning of a target word is iconically expressed, or highlighted, in the phonetic properties of its immediate verbal context. To this end, we extracted single lines from German poems that all include a word designating high or low dominance, such as large or small, strong or weak, etc. Based on insights from previous studies, we expected to find more vowels with a relatively short distance between the first two formants (low formant dispersion) in the immediate context of words expressing high physical or social dominance than in the context of words expressing low dominance. Our findings support this hypothesis, suggesting that neighboring words can form iconic dyads in which the meaning of one word is sound-iconically reflected in the phonetic properties of adjacent words. The construct of a contiguity-based phono-semantic iconicity opens many venues for future research well beyond lines extracted from poems.

Mental activity and underlying brain activity cannot be understood outside of the context of bodily activities (Davis and MacNeilage, 2000: 230).

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2017

Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (e.g., objects of a certain size or shape). Some of the best-known examples include the mil/mal effect (Sapir, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239, 1929) and the maluma/takete effect (Köhler, 1929). Interest in this topic has been on the rise within psychology, and studies have demonstrated that sound symbolic effects are relevant for many facets of cognition, including language, action, memory, and categorization. Sound symbolism also provides a mechanism by which words' forms can have nonarbitrary, iconic relationships with their meanings. Although various proposals have been put forth for how phonetic features (both acoustic and articulatory) come to be associated with stimuli, there is as yet no generally agreed-upon explanation. We review five proposals: statistical co-occurrence between phonetic features and associated stimuli in the environment, a shared property among phonetic features and stimuli; neural factors; species-general, evolved associations; and patterns extracted from language. We identify a number of outstanding questions that need to be addressed on this topic and suggest next steps for the field.