![]() ![]() Such relations have often been observed with non-linguistic words and have been defined synesthetic sound symbolism ( Hinton et al., 2006). Most of the first studies focused on the exploration of a relation between syllables and the size or shape of visual stimuli. Although this seminal assumption regarding the arbitrariness of natural language has been widely acknowledged for decades, a growing body of literature suggests that non-arbitrary correspondences between sound structure and linguistic category also exist, and that listeners with unrelated language experiences can be sensitive to these correspondences ( Sapir, 1929 Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001 Nygaard et al., 2009 Kovic et al., 2010).Ī long history of sound symbolism research has investigated the existence of a correspondence between speech sounds and semantic dimensions. Furthermore, arbitrariness is considered a distinctive feature of spoken language that differentiates it from other communication systems. The notion formulated by de Saussure about arbitrariness argues that a systematic connection does not exist between the sound of a word and its semantic concept ( De Saussure, 1916 Hockett, 1977). Importantly, the evidence that there were no differences between Italian and Polish participants allows us to conclude that the sound symbolism is independent of the mother tongue of the listener.Ī central assumption of modern linguistics is that the relationship between the acoustic features of a word and its meaning is fundamentally arbitrary. We confirm the existence of sound symbolic processing in natural unknown languages, and we speculate that some possible difference in the iconicity of the languages could be the basis for the difference we found. Results were significant for nouns and verbs, but not for adjectives. When analyzed separately for each language and for each word category, the results were significant for Finnish and Japanese, whereas the recognition rate was not significantly better than chance for Swahili and Tamil. A first overall analysis confirmed a semantic role of sound symbols, the performance of participants being higher than expected by chance. ![]() Three different word categories were presented: nouns, verbs and adjectives. The alternatives were presented in the mother tongue of participants. With the aim to better investigate this relationship by using natural languages, in the present cross-linguistic study 215 Italian and Polish participants were asked to listen to words pronounced in 4 unknown non-indo-European languages (Finnish, Japanese, Swahili, Tamil) and to try to guess the correct meaning of each word, by choosing among 3 alternatives visualized on a computer screen. Sound symbolism refers to a non-arbitrary relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning. ![]()
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