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...

This review covers experimental approaches to sound-symbolism-from infants to adults, and from Sapir's foundational studies to twenty-first century product naming. It synthesizes recent behavioral, developmental, and neuroimaging work into a systematic overview of the cross-modal correspondences that underpin iconic links between form and meaning. It also identifies open questions and opportuni...

Although the relationship between sound and meaning in language is arbitrary, reliable correspondences between sound and meaning have been found in natural language. These sound symbolic relationships affect word learning, but less is known about how sound symbolism affects online processing during learning or for well-learned stimuli. We use the visual world paradigm and an artificial lexicon ...

it is obvious that literature means prose and poetry and makes no difference either by arabs or non – arabs. but symbolism in the arabic concept has emerged since the emergence of the dark era’s literature and is loaned from the specific characteristics of dark era’s lives and is based on two elements: brevity and indirect speech. since the symbolism has emerged like a literary school generally...

The Covenant of the Promised Land: Territorial Symbolism in the Book of Mormon

A long tradition in sound symbolism describes a host of sound-meaning linkages, or associations between individual speech sounds and concepts or object properties. Might sound symbolism extend beyond sound-meaning relationships to linkages between sounds and modes of thinking? Integrating sound symbolism with construal level theory, we investigate whether vowel sounds influence the mental level...

Research into sound-symbolism has shown that people can consistently associate certain pseudo-words with certain referents; for instance, pseudo-words with rounded vowels and sonorant consonants are linked to round shapes, while pseudowords with unrounded vowels and obstruents (with a noncontinuous airflow), are associated with sharp shapes. Such sound-symbolic associations have been proposed t...