Some words are sound-symbolic in that they involve a non-arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning. Here, we report that 25-month-old children are sensitive to cross-linguistically valid sound-symbolic matches in the domain of action and that this sound symbolism facilitates verb learning in young children. We constructed a set of novel sound-symbolic verbs whose sounds were judged to ma...

The notion that linguistic forms and meanings are related only by convention and not by any direct relationship between sounds and semantic concepts is a foundational principle of modern linguistics. Though the principle generally holds across the lexicon, systematic exceptions have been identified. These "sound symbolic" forms have been identified in lexical items and linguistic processes in m...

Experimental and cross-linguistic evidence suggests that certain speech sounds are associated with size, especially high front vowels ‘small’ low back ‘large’. However, empirical statistically magnitude across words within a language has been mixed open to methodological critique. Here, we used random-forest analysis of near-exhaustive set English size adjectives (e.g.,tiny, gargantuan) determi...

Fungwa marks the diminutive by fronting non-high vowels of nominal roots and augmentative backing roots. The root-vowel mutation is considered to be an effect morphemes which have [?back] [+back] features as their phonetic exponents. form–meaning association consistent with pattern sound-size symbolism in various languages. Thus presents categorical deterministic evidence for symbolism. To acco...

It is being increasingly recognized that the Saussurean dictum of “the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” is in conflict with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon commonly known as “sound symbolism”. After first presenting a historical overview of the debate, however, we conclude that both positions have been exaggerated, and that an adequate explanation of sound symbolism is still lacking. H...

Listeners associate certain vowels and consonants with specific meanings, known as phonetic/sound symbolism. For example, the vowel // is often associated with small, thin and more female entities compared to the vowel //. Sound symbolism studies so far mainly focused on the effects of intrinsic pitch (F0) of vowels while no research has taken other intrinsic properties, such as intensity, in...