Sound Symbolism and Onomatopoeia

Experiments in investigating sound symbolism and onomatopoeia

The area of sound symbolism and onomatopoeia is an interesting area for studying the production and interpretation of neologisms in language. One question is whether neologisms are created haphazardly or governed by rules. Another question is how this can be studied. Of the approximately 60 000 words in the Swedish lexicon 1 500 have been judged to be sound symbolic (Abelin 1999). These were an...

Sound Symbolism

Sound symbolism is the term for a hypothesized systematic relationship between sound and meaning (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala 1994). The idea that there might be a non-arbitrary relationship between the physical aspect of a speech signal and its meaning is quite an old idea, dating back at least to the time of Plato who, in his work Cratylus, had Socrates debating with two pupils the issue of whet...

Synthesized size-sound sound-symbolism

Studies of sound symbolism have shown that people can associate sound and meaning in consistent ways when presented with maximally contrastive stimulus pairs of nonwords such as bouba/kiki (rounded/sharp) or mil/mal (small/big). Recent work has shown the effect extends to antonymic words from natural languages and has proposed a role for shared cross-modal correspondences in biasing formto-mean...

South Siberian Sound Symbolism

South Siberian Turkic languages are rich in sound symbolic subsystems, both in their lexica and in the productive morphophonology, but these systems remain to be adequately documented. This paper presents new field data on sound symbolism in two South Siberian Turkic languages: Tofa(lar) and Tuvan (including the unwritten Tsengel and Hovd dialects spoken in Mongolia). Sound symbolic word format...

Sex, Sound Symbolism, and Sociolinguistics