Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infan...

Sound symbolism is the term for a hypothesized systematic relationship between sound and meaning (Hinton, Nichols, & Ohala 1994). The idea that there might be a non-arbitrary relationship between the physical aspect of a speech signal and its meaning is quite an old idea, dating back at least to the time of Plato who, in his work Cratylus, had Socrates debating with two pupils the issue of whet...

Certain correspondences between the sound and meaning of words can be observed in subsets of the vocabulary. These sound-symbolic relationships have been suggested to result in easier language acquisition, but previous studies have explicitly tested effects of sound symbolism on learning category distinctions but not on word learning. In 2 word learning experiments, we varied the extent to whic...

The relationship between meanings of words and their sound shapes is to a large extent arbitrary, but it is well known that languages exhibit sound symbolism effects violating arbitrariness. Evidence for sound symbolism is typically anecdotal, however. Here we present a systematic approach. Using a selection of basic vocabulary in nearly one half of the world’s languages we find commonalities a...

Sound symbolism refers to a non-arbitrary relationship between linguistic sounds and meanings. Sound symbolism has been discussed in relation to the ontogenesis of language. Our previous ERP study revealed that preverbal infants who are just about to start word learning show the N400 response to sound symbolically mismatched speech sound-visual shape pairs, suggesting that the infants detected ...

Sound-symbolism is the nonarbitrary link between the sound and meaning of a word. Japanesespeaking children performed better in a verb generalization task when they were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on existing Japanese sound-symbolic words, than novel nonsound-symbolic verbs (Imai, Kita, Nagumo, & Okada, 2008). A question remained as to whether the Japanese children had pic...

This paper demonstrates a new quantitative approach to identify what is behind universally sensed sound symbolism and sound symbolism detected only by speakers of a particular language. We presented 70 locomotion videos to Japanese and English speakers and asked them to create a word that would sound-symbolically match each action, then to rate the action on five semantic dimensions. Multivaria...

There are numerous studies demonstrating that people’s judgments about meanings of words can sometimes derive from their sound – a phenomenon often referred to as sound symbolism. A recent comprehensive assessment of English demonstrates that some small amount of systematicity exists between form and meaning. Is this small level of systematicity in language sufficient to drive the observed beha...

Sound symbolism, or the nonarbitrary link between linguistic sound and meaning, has often been discussed in connection with language evolution, where the oral imitation of external events links phonetic forms with their referents (e.g., Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may also facilitate synchronic language learning in human infants. Sound sym...

Studies of sound symbolism have shown that people can associate sound and meaning in consistent ways when presented with maximally contrastive stimulus pairs of nonwords such as bouba/kiki (rounded/sharp) or mil/mal (small/big). Recent work has shown the effect extends to antonymic words from natural languages and has proposed a role for shared cross-modal correspondences in biasing formto-mean...