A fundamental question in language development is how infants start to assign meaning to words. Here, using three Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based measures of brain activity, we establish that preverbal 11-month-old infants are sensitive to the non-arbitrary correspondences between language sounds and concepts, that is, to sound symbolism. In each trial, infant participants were presented with ...

Sexual selection has resulted in sex-based size dimorphism in many mammals, including humans. In Western societies, average to taller stature men and comparatively shorter, slimmer women have higher reproductive success and are typically considered more attractive. This size dimorphism also extends to vocalisations in many species, again including humans, with larger individuals exhibiting lowe...

The aim of the present paper is to experimentally test whether sound symbolism has selective effects on labels with different ranges-of-reference within a simple noun-hierarchy. In two experiments, adult participants learned the make up of two categories of unfamiliar objects ('alien life forms'), and were passively exposed to either category-labels or item-labels, in a learning-by-guessing cat...

The current project is a case study–and an extension–of the traditional investigation into sound symbolism (Hinton et al., 1994). Several studies have shown that certain sounds evoke images of particular shapes; for example, oral stop consonants are often associated with angular shapes, whereas sonorants (nasals, liquids, and glides) are associated with round shapes (Berlin, 2006; Köhler, 1947)...

The nature of the relationship between an object and its name has interested thinkers ince early times. At a period as early as that of the &reeks, there was much speculation about this general problem, the Sophists denying the possibility of any objective interconnection between object and name, and the Stoics affirming the objective validity of words.l A more particular question has been form...

As onomatopoeic words or expressions are attractive, the users of languages in the fields of religion, literature, music, education, linguistics, trade, and so forth wish to utilize them in their utterances. They are more effective and imaginative than the simple words. Onomatopoeic words or expressions attach us to the real nature and to our inner senses. This study aims at familiarity with on...

The existence of sound-to-shape correspondences has been demonstrated in the literature on sound-symbolism using double forced-choice paradigms and ad hoc figures. In two experiments, we tested if the sound-shape correspondence effect would be observed when participants were required to name one by one figures of every-day entities. Additionally, as stimuli represented known entities, we hypoth...

Sound symbolism– non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning– exists cross-linguistically and facilitates listeners’ ability to infer the meaning of foreign words. However, the specificity of these mappings remains unclear. The present study investigated whether sound symbolic properties correspond only to a specific meaning domain or to other semantic dimensions a...

ion within the experimental paradigm. For example, in afore mentioned study of Westbury (2005) these two aspects of word haven’t been systematically controlled, so that words used as stimuli refer to object of different level of abstraction (e.g. noon and nail). Given those facts, it seems necessary to reconsider Westbury’s claim that sound-symbolism is pre-semantic effect and to examine a pote...