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 propose...

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...

Sound symbolism or the nonarbitrary link between language sound and meaning are commonly found across many languages of the world. A well-known example is the association between rounded vs. angular shapes and labels (i.e., the Bouba-kiki effect by Köhler, 1929/1947). Previous research has shown that sound symbolic words play facilitative role for preschool children’s novel verb learning (Imai,...

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of non-arbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese may aid early verb learning, and a recent extende...

In many of my writings I have argued that poetic images have no fixed predetermined meanings. In my 1992 book What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?—The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception (originally published in 1987) I propounded the view that speech sounds do not have fixed predetermined symbolic values either.1 Poetic images as well as speech sounds are clusters of features, each of which may ...

It is shown that pairs of demonstratives in which there is a vocalic opposition have an advantage in their struggle for existence in languages when F2’ is higher in the proximal than in the distal form. It is also shown that nasals are preferred in first person pronouns while stops and other obstruents are preferred in second person pronouns. Explanations are suggested for both findings. They i...

Verb learning seems especially difficult for children learning many languages, at least relative to nouns. Many have speculated because this is because verbs refer to relational events that are components of much more complex events. Consider a buying-selling event. If the child hears the verb “buy”, does it mean sell, get, handover, give money, or perhaps smile? By this view, a key problem in ...

Rapidly communicating the emotional valence of stimuli (i.e., negativity or positivity) is vital for averting dangers and acquiring rewards. We therefore hypothesized that human languages signal emotions via individual phonemes (emotional sound symbolism), and more specifically that the phonemes at the beginning of the word signal its valence, as this would maximize the receiver's time to respo...