Mappings between linguistic sound and motion

This paper provides an overview of the possible function of nonarbitrary mappings between linguistic form and meaning, and presents new empirical evidence showing that shared cross-modal associations may underlie motion sound-symbolism in particular. In terms of function, several lines of empirical and theoretical evidence suggest that non-arbitrary form-meaning connections could have played a crucial role in lexical emergence during language evolution. Furthermore, the persistence of such non-arbitrariness in some areas of modern language may also be highly functional, as recent data has shown that non-arbitrary forms may help to bootstrap learning in children (Imai, Kita, Nagumo, and Okada, 2008) and adults (Nielsen and Rendall, 2012). Given the functional role of these non-arbitrary mappings between linguistic form and meaning, this paper describes new experimental data demonstrating shared mappings between non-sense words and visual motion using a direct matching task. Participants were given nonsense words that varied in terms of their voicing, reduplication, and vowel quality, and asked to change the movement of a ball to match a given word. Results show that back vowels are mapped onto slower speeds, and consonant reduplication with vowel alternation is mapped onto faster speeds. These results show a shared crossmodal association between linguistic sound and motion, which is likely leveraged in sound-symbolic systems found in natural language.