There is something about the sound of a pseudoword like takete that goes better with a spiky, than a curvy shape (Köhler, 1929:1947). Yet despite decades of research into sound symbolism, the role of this effect on real words in the lexicons of natural languages remains controversial. We report one behavioural and one ERP study investigating whether sound symbolism is active during normal langu...

Lexical sound symbolism in language appears to exploit the feature associations embedded in cross-sensory correspondences. For example, words incorporating relatively high acoustic frequencies (i.e., front/close rather than back/open vowels) are deemed more appropriate as names for concepts associated with brightness, lightness in weight, sharpness, smallness, speed, and thinness, because highe...

Although the sound-meaning relationship is often arbitrary (Saussure 1916), cases exist in which some sounds correspond to certain meanings. Such association between sounds and meanings is known as sound symbolism, and there has been a longstanding interest in the existence and the nature of sound symbolism. This paper reports an experiment on size-related sound symbolism, which shows that cert...

Sound symbolism or the nonarbitrary link between language sound and meaning are commonly found across many languages of the world. A well-known example is the association between rounded vs. angular shapes and labels (i.e., the Bouba-kiki effect by Köhler, 1929/1947). Previous research has shown that sound symbolic words play facilitative role for preschool children’s novel verb learning (Imai,...

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of non-arbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese may aid early verb learning, and a recent extende...

Verb learning seems especially difficult for children learning many languages, at least relative to nouns. Many have speculated because this is because verbs refer to relational events that are components of much more complex events. Consider a buying-selling event. If the child hears the verb “buy”, does it mean sell, get, handover, give money, or perhaps smile? By this view, a key problem in ...

The history of chemical nomenclature and symbolism is resplendent not only with proposals that were once widely used in the chemical literature, but which have since been displaced by more modern developments, but also with those which, however logical, were doomed to oblivion almost from their inception and which now survive as historical relics to be found only in the papers and books of thei...

South Siberian Turkic languages are rich in sound symbolic subsystems, both in their lexica and in the productive morphophonology, but these systems remain to be adequately documented. This paper presents new field data on sound symbolism in two South Siberian Turkic languages: Tofa(lar) and Tuvan (including the unwritten Tsengel and Hovd dialects spoken in Mongolia). Sound symbolic word format...