Background: The present study was designed to investigate the use of sound symbolic mappings in fictitious brand names. Sound refer existence a nonarbitrary relationship between individual sounds and associations different attributes concepts. Given that have inherent meaning them, names line with established effects could communicate tailored messages are congruent consumer expectations produc...

The aptitude for symbolization, characteristic of man, is revealed not only in artistic representations and funerary practices. It is exhibited by every manifestation of human activity or representation of natural phenomena that assumes or refers to a meaning. We can recognize functional symbolism (tool-making, habitative or food technology), social symbolism, (language and social communication...

Abstract Sound symbolism is a well-researched topic of psycholinguistics, which tries to comprehend the connection between sound word and its meanings. The Bouba-Kiki effect , one form symbolism, claims that people perceive pronunciation “Kiki” as pointier than “Bouba.” There no research focuses on modeling such perception, i.e., how pointy sounds humans, through computational data-driven appro...

Non-lexical speech sounds (conversational grunts), such as uh-huh, un-hn, mm, and oh, are common in English. In human dialogs these sounds are important in conversation control and for conveying attitudes. Spoken dialog systems may make use of these sounds to achieve concise, smooth, relaxed interactions. Doing so is, however, a challenge, because most algorithms used in spoken language process...

The problem of iconicity has been a recurring theme in linguistic inquiry into the nature of the linguistic sign. The property of iconicity includes not only the narrow category of sound symbolism, but also the broad categories of isomorphism and metaphor. This paper surveys recent research, and offers a classification of diagrammatic and metaphorical iconicity in language. Problems of structur...

Two experiments investigated the effects of phonetic symbolism on brand name preference. Participants indicated preference for fictitious brand names for particular products (or for products with particular attributes) from word pairs that differed only on vowel sound (e.g., front vs. back vowels, or vowel sounds associated with positive vs. negative concepts). Participants preferred brand name...

The present paper aims at contributing to the field of sound symbolism and, more specifically, to the association between sounds and colours as established by nonsynesthetes. A study based on a forced-choice task performed by Spanish and Arabic speakers is presented. The study asks participants to listen to primary cardinal vowels and choose from a range of colours the one considered most suita...