Further, although sound symbolism has often been examined using nonwords, here we studied it in the context of existing first names. Here we explored a novel association between phonemes and a more abstract dimension: personality. For instance, the maluma-takete effect is the sound symbolic association between sonorant and voiceless stop phonemes and round and sharp visual shapes, respectively. Sound symbolism has typically been demonstrated as an association between certain phonemes and perceptual dimensions (e.g., size or shape). These findings provide insights on how we could better use letters for communicative relationships among writers and readers.

Our findings suggest that each written Japanese vowel itself, with its individual characteristics, could individually contribute to specific and subjective physical and emotional evaluations. These results were consistent with previous findings in which vowels in sound-symbolic words have been associated with physical (i.e., size, closeness, thickness and width) and emotional (i.e., affection) evaluations. The results showed that the size, closeness, thickness and width of a, u and o were significantly higher than those of i and e, whereas the affection and familiarity of a were higher than the others.

Six hundred and thirteen participants used five-point semantic differential scales for 10 features (size, closeness, thickness, width, weight, height, depth, affection, excitement and familiarity) to rate written Japanese vowels (a, i, u, e, and o ). The purpose of this study was to examine whether each written vowel in a given language was individually associated with specific subjective evaluations. Previous findings of sound symbolism have shown that words including specific consonants or vowels or mouth shapes to pronounce specific vowels associate with specific and subjective physical and emotional evaluations. Verbal sounds can be associated with specific meanings, a phenomenon called sound symbolism. By comparing schematic mapping in Chinese with other languages, the study illuminates a cross-linguistic tendency in addition to a Chinese-specific iconic relation between sound and meaning. The results show that phonemes and syllable combination patterns are closely related to perceivable character features. A quantitative method was used to investigate the distribution of different phonological units in character denomination depending on their physical and emotional traits. The paper describes a case study of Chinese storybooks with the goal of testing whether phonosemantic association is prominent between name sounds and character features. As sound symbolism is supposed to be a universal cognitive phenomenon, this research seeks to investigate whether iconic structures of Mandarin are embodied in native Chinese speakers’ language experience. However, quantitative analysis of sound-meaning association in Chinese has not been extensively developed, and little is known about the impact of sound symbolism in children’s literature.

Iconicity is a fundamental property of spoken and signed languages. Together these results add to our understanding of the importance of non-arbitrariness in language. Finally, while previous studies have looked at effects of arbitrary and non-arbitrary mappings contained in a single stimulus, this is the first study to demonstrate that different kinds of non-arbitrary mappings can have an effect when appearing in the same stimulus. The results also show that sound symbolism can emerge in stimuli with existing associated information (i.e., endings indicative of grammatical gender, and the association that they evoke). These results demonstrate that speakers of a language with grammatical gender associate different properties to words belonging to different genders. As predicted, the English speakers showed no effects of grammatical gender, while the French speakers did.

This was repeated using auditory presentation with both an English-speaking (Experiment 2a) and French-speaking (Experiment 2b) sample. French speakers also associated nonwords containing round-sounding (sharp-sounding) phonemes with round (sharp) shapes. In Experiment 1, we found that French speakers associated nonwords containing feminine (masculine) endings with round (sharp) shapes. We manipulated these two elements orthogonally, allowing us to examine the effect of each. Here we investigated two sources of non-arbitrariness: systematicity (via grammatical gender) and iconic-ity (via shape sound symbolism). While the arbitrariness of language has long been considered one of its defining features, there is growing evidence that non-arbitrariness also plays an important role.

Soundtap 2.31 serial key