Despite Saussure's famous observation that sound-meaning relationships are in principle arbitrary, we now have a substantial body of evidence that sounds themselves can have meanings, patterns often referred to as "sound symbolism". Previous studies have found that particular sounds can be associated with particular meanings, and also with particular static visual shapes. Less well studied is t...

According to sound symbolism theory, individual sounds or clusters of sounds can convey meaning. To examine the role of sound symbolic effects on processing and memory for nonwords, we developed a novel set of 100 nonwords to convey largeness (nonwords containing plosive consonants and back vowels) and smallness (nonwords containing fricative consonants and front vowels). In Experiments 1A and ...

The paper reports on an experiment conducted to investigate the nature of speech sound perception in terms of cross-modal mappings between vowel sound stimuli and colour spectrum associations. The study is based on the assumptions stemming from research on synaesthesia, sound symbolism and non-modularity of human perception. The findings indicate that vowel-sound mappings appear non-arbitrary i...

Sound symbolism is the non-arbitrary association of sound and meaning. Experiment 1 demonstrates that sound symbolic associations facilitate the online processing of male and female voices when the target words contain the vowels /A/ and /i/ for male and female voices, respectively, when listeners are engaged in a speeded gender identification task. Experiment 2 reveals that when listeners are ...