Which words are most iconic? Iconicity in English sensory words

Interaction Studies

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2017, Pages 430-451

  Winter, Bodo ^a   Perlman, Marcus ^a   Perry, Lynn K ^b   Lupyan, Gary ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

^b Department of Biology   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

Onomatopoeia; Perception; Sound; Sound symbolism; Touch

Indexed keywords

EID: 85038373588     PISSN: 15720373     EISSN: 15720381     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1075/is.18.3.07win     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (95)

1. Ahlner, F., & Zlatev, J. (2010). Cross-modal iconicity: A cognitive semiotic approach to sound symbolism. Sign Systems Studies, 1, 298-348. doi: 10.12697/SSS.2010.38.1-4.11
2. Arata, M., Imai, M., Okuda, J., Okada, H., & Matsuda, T. (2010). Gesture in language: How sound symbolic words are processed in the brain. In R. Camtrabone & S. Ohlsson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1374-1379). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
3. Armstrong, D. F., & Wilcox, S. E. (2007). The gestural origin of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195163483.001.0001
4. Balota, D. A., Yap, M. J., Hutchison, K. A., Cortese, M. J., Kessler, B., Loftis, B., Neely, J. H., Nelson, D. L., Simpson, G. B., & Treiman, R. (2007). The English lexicon project. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 445-459. doi: 10.3758/BF03193014
5. Bartley, S. H. (1953). The perception of size or distance based on tactile and kinesthetic data. The Journal of Psychology, 36, 401-408. doi: 10.1080/00223980.1953.9712906
6. Bergen, B. K. (2004). The psychological reality of phonesthemes. Language, 80, 290-311. doi: 10.1353/lan. 2004.0056
7. Blasi, D. E., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., Stadler, P. F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2016). Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 10818-10823. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1605782113
8. Blust, R. (2003). The phonestheme NG in Austronesian languages. Oceanic Linguistics, 42, 187-212.
9. Brysbaert, M., New, B., & Keuleers, E. (2012). Adding part-of-speech information to the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 991-997. doi: 10.3758/s13428-012-0190-4
10. Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. M., & Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousands generally known English word lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 46, 904-911. doi: 10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5
11. Carlson, N. R. (2010). Physiology of behavior (10th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
12. Connell, L., & Lynott, D. (2012). Strength of perceptual experience predicts word processing performance better than concreteness or imageability. Cognition, 125, 452-465. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition. 2012.07.010
13. Cortese, M. J., & Fugett, A. (2004). Imageability ratings for 3, 000 monosyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 384-387. doi: 10.3758/BF03195585
14. Crisinel, A. S., Jones, S., & Spence, C. (2012). 'The sweet taste of maluma': Crossmodal associations between tastes and words. Chemosensory Perception, 5, 266-273.
15. Cuskley, C. (2013). Mappings between linguistic sound and motion. Public Journal of Semiotics, 5, 39-62.
16. Cuskley, C., & Kirby, S. (2013). Synaesthesia, cross-modality and language evolution. In J. Simner & E. M. Hubbard (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Synaesthesia (pp. 869-907). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
17. Davis, R. (1961). The fitness of names to drawings: A cross-cultural study in Tanganyika. British Journal of Psychology, 52, 259-268. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1961.tb00788.x
18. de Saussure, F. (1959) [1916]. Course in General Linguistics. New York: The philosophical library.
19. Dingemanse, M. (2011a). Ideophones and the aesthetics of everyday language in a West-African society. The Senses and Society, 6, 77-85. doi: 10.2752/174589311X12893982233830
20. Dingemanse, M. (2011b). The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu. PhD dissertation. Radboud University, Nijmegen.
21. Dingemanse, M. (2012). Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6, 654-672. doi: 10.1002/lnc3.361
22. Dingemanse, M. (2014). Making new ideophones in Siwu: Creative depiction in conversation. Pragmatics and Society, 5, 384-405. doi: 10.1075/ps.5.3.04din
23. Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D. E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19, 603-615. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2015.07.013
24. Dingemanse, M., & Majid, A. (2012). The semantic structure of sensory vocabulary in an African language. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 300-305). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
25. Dragulescu, A. A. (2014). xlsx: Read, write, format Excel 2007 and Excel 97/2000/XP/2003 files. R package version 0.5.7.
26. Essegbey, J. (2013). Touch ideophones in Nyagbo. In O. O. Orie & K. W. Sanders (Eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics (pp. 235-243). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
27. Etzi, R., Spence, C., Zampini, M., & Gallace, A. (2016). When sandpaper is 'kiki' and satin is 'bouba': An exploration of the associations between words, emotional states, and the tactile attributes of everyday materials. Multisensory Research, 29, 133-155. doi: 10.1163/22134808-00002497
28. Farmer, T. A., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2006). Phonological typicality influences on-line sentence comprehension. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 12203-12208. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0602173103
29. Fay, N., Arbib, M., & Garrod, S. (2013). How to bootstrap a human communication system. Cognitive Science, 37, 1356-1367. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12048
30. Fay, N., Lister, C. J., Ellison, T. M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). Creating a communication system from scratch: Gesture beats vocalization hands down. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 354. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00354
31. Firth, J. R. (1930). Speech. London: Ernest Benn.
32. Firth, J. R. (1935). The use and distribution of certain English sounds. English Studies, 17, 8-18. doi: 10.1080/00138383508596629
33. Fischer, S. (1922). Über das Entstehen und Verstehen von Namen. Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, 42, 335-368.
34. Fontana, F. (2013). Association of haptic trajectories with takete and maluma. In I. Oakley & S. Brewster (Eds.), Haptic and audio interaction design (pp. 60-68). Berlin: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-41068-0-7
35. Fox, J., & Weisberg, S. (2011). An {R} companion to applied regression (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
36. Fryer, L., Freeman, J., & Pring, L. (2014). Touching words is not enough: How visual experience influences haptic-auditory associations in the "Bouba-Kiki" effect. Cognition, 132, 164-173. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition. 2014.03.015
37. Gallace, A., Boschin, E., & Spence, C. (2011). On the taste of "Bouba" and "Kiki": An exploration of word-food associations in neurologically normal participants. Cognitive Neuroscience, 2, 34-46. doi: 10.1080/17588928.2010.516820
38. Guest, S., Catmur, C., Lloyd, D., & Spence, C. (2002). Audiotactile interactions in roughness perception. Experimental Brain Research, 146, 161-171. doi: 10.1007/s00221-002-1164-z
39. Hashimoto, T., Usui, N., Taira, M., Nose, I., Haji, T., & Kojima, S. (2006). The neural mechanism associated with the processing of onomatopoeic sounds. Neuroimage, 31, 1762-1770. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.02.019
40. Hinton, L., Nichols, J., & Ohala, J. (1994). Introduction: sound-symbolic processes. In L. Hinton, J. Nichols, & J. Ohala (Eds.), Sound Symbolism (pp. 1-12). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
41. Hockett, C. F. (1982 [1960]). The origin of speech. Scientific American, 203, 88-111.
42. Reprinted in: W. S.-Y. Wang. (1982), Human communication: Language and its psychobiological bases (pp. 40-12). San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0960-88
43. Hutchins, S. S. (1998). The psychological reality, variability, and compositionality of English phonesthemes. Atlanta: Emory University dissertation.
44. Imai, M., Kita, S., Nagumo, M., & Okada, H. (2008). Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning. Cognition, 109, 54-65. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition. 2008.07.015
45. Imai, M., & Kita, S. (2014). The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Series B, Biological Sciences, 369, 20130298. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0298
46. Jousmäki, V., & Hari, R. (1998). Parchment-skin illusion: Sound-biased touch. Current Biology, 8, R190-R191. doi: 10.1016/S0960-9822 (98) 70120-4
47. Juhasz, B. J., & Yap, M. J. (2013). Sensory experience ratings for over 5, 000 mono- and disyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods, 45, 160-168. doi: 10.3758/s13428-012-0242-9
48. Kelly, M. H. (1992). Using sound to solve syntactic problems: The role of phonology in grammatical category assignments. Psychological review, 99, 349-364. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.99.2.349
49. Köhler, W. (1929). Gestalt Psychology. New York: Liveright.
50. Kwon, N., & Round, E. R. (2015). Phonesthemes in morphological theory. Morphology, 25, 1-27.
51. Lockwood, G., & Dingemanse, M. (2015). Iconicity in the lab: A review of behavioral, developmental, and neuroimaging research into sound-symbolism. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1246.
52. Lynott, D., & Connell, L. (2009). Modality exclusivity norms for 423 object properties. Behavior Research Methods, 41, 558-564. doi: 10.3758/BRM.41.2.558
53. Lynott, D., & Connell, L. (2013). Modality exclusivity norms for 400 nouns: The relationship between perceptual experience and surface word form. Behavior Research Methods, 45, 516-526. doi: 10.3758/s13428-012-0267-0
54. Marchand, H. (1959). Phonetic symbolism in English word formations. Indogermanische Forschungen, 64, 146-168.
55. Marchand, H. (1960). The categories and types of present-day English word formation. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
56. Marks, L. E. (1978). The unity of the senses: Interrelations among the modalities. New York: Academic Press. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-472960-5.50011-1
57. Meir, I., Padden, C., Aronoff, M., & Sandler, W. (2013). Competing iconicities in the structure of languages. Cognitive Linguistics, 24, 309-343. doi: 10.1515/cog-2013-0010
58. Monaghan, P., Shillcock, R. C., Christiansen, M. H., & Kirby, S. (2014). How arbitrary is English? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Series B, Biological Sciences, 369, 20130299. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0299
59. Navarro, D. J. (2015) Learning statistics with R: A tutorial for psychology students and other beginners (Version 0.5). Adelaide: University of Adelaide.
60. Ngo, M. K., Misra, R., & Spence, C. (2011). Assessing the shapes and speech sounds that people associate with chocolate samples varying in cocoa content. Food Quality and Preference, 22, 567-572. doi: 10.1016/j.foodqual.2011.03.009
61. Nielsen, A., & Rendall, D. (2011). The sound of round: Evaluating the sound-symbolic role of consonants in the classic Takete-Maluma phenomenon. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65, 115-124. doi: 10.1037/a0022268
62. Nielsen, A., & Rendall, D. (2012). The source and magnitude of sound-symbolic biases in processing artificial word material and their implications for language learning and transmission. Language and Cognition, 4, 115-125. doi: 10.1515/langcog-2012-0007
63. Nielsen, A. K., & Rendall, D. (2013). Parsing the role of consonants versus vowels in the classic Takete-Maluma phenomenon. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67, 153-163. doi: 10.1037/a0030553
64. Ohala, J. J. (1994). The frequency code underlies the sound symbolic use of voice pitch. In L. Hinton, J. Nichols, & J. J. Ohala (Eds.), Sound symbolism (pp. 325-347). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
65. Osaka, N., Osaka, M., Morishita, M., Kondo, H., & Fukuyama, H. (2004). A word expressing affective pain activates the anterior cingulate cortex in the human brain: An fMRI study. Behavioural Brain Research, 153, 123-127. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2003.11.013
66. Paivio, A., Yuille, J. C., & Madigan, S. A. (1968). Concreteness, imagery and meaningfulness values for 925 words. Journal of Experimental Psychology Monograph Supplement, 76(3, Pt. 2), 1-25. doi: 10.1037/h0025327
67. Perlman, M., & Cain, A. (2014). Iconicity in vocalization, comparisons with gesture, and implications for theories on the evolution of language. Gesture, 14, 321-351. doi: 10.1075/gest.14.3.03per
68. Perlman, M., Dale, R., & Lupyan, G. (2015). Iconicity can ground the creation of vocal symbols. Royal Society Open Science, 2, 150152. doi: 10.1098/rsos.150152
69. Perry, L. K., Perlman, M., & Lupyan, G. (2015). Iconicity in English and Spanish and its relation to lexical category and age of acquisition. PloS One, 10, e0137147. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0137147
70. Perry, L. K., Perlman, M., Winter, B., Massaro, D. M., & Lupyan, G. (submitted). Iconicity in the speech of children and adults. Developmental Science, e12572 doi: 10.1111/desc.12572
71. Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 707-784. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X00081061
72. Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia - a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, 3-34.
73. Rhodes, R. (1994). Aural images. In L. Hinton, J. Nichols, & J. J. Ohala (Eds.), Sound symbolism (pp. 276-292). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
74. R Core Team. (2015). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
75. Sapir, E. (1929). A study in phonetic symbolism. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239. doi: 10.1037/h0070931
76. Schroeder, C. E., Lindsley, R. W., Specht, C., Marcovici, A., Smiley, J. F., & Javitt, D. C. (2001). Somatosensory input to auditory association cortex in the macaque monkey. Journal of Neurophysiology, 85, 1322-1327.
77. Schürmann, M., Caetano, G., Jousmäki, V., & Hari, R. (2004). Hands help hearing: facilitatory audiotactile interaction at low sound-intensity levels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 115, 830-832. doi: 10.1121/1.1639909
78. Simner, J., Cuskley, C., & Kirby, S. (2010). What sound does that taste? Cross-modal mappings across gustation and audition. Perception, 39, 553-569. doi: 10.1068/p6591
79. Sutherland, S. L., & Cimpian, A. (2015). An explanatory heuristic gives rise to the belief that words are well suited for their referents. Cognition, 143, 228-240. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition. 2015.07.002
80. Suzuki, Y., Gyoba, J., & Sakamoto, S. (2008). Selective effects of auditory stimuli on tactile roughness perception. Brain Research, 1242, 87-94. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2008.06.104
81. Talmy, L. (1991). Path to realization: A typology of event conflation. Berkeley Working Papers in Linguistics, 480-519.
82. Torchiano, M. (2015). Effsize: Efficient effect size computation. R package version 0.5.4.
83. Urban, M. (2011). Conventional sound symbolism in terms for organs of speech: A cross-linguistic study. Folia Linguistica, 45(1), 199-213. doi: 10.1515/flin. 2011.007
84. Usnadze, D. (1924). Ein experimentller Beitrag zum Problem der psychologischen Grundlagen der Namengebung. Psychologische Forschung, 5, 24-43. doi: 10.1007/BF00402395
85. Vigliocco, G., Perniss, P., & Vinson, D. (2014). Language as a multimodal phenomenon: Implications for language learning, processing and evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, 369, 20130292. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0292
86. Vinson, D. P., Cormier, K., Denmark, T., Schembri, A., & Vigliocco, G. (2008). The British Sign Language (BSL) norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, and iconicity. Behavior Research Methods, 40, 1079-1087. doi: 10.3758/BRM.40.4.1079
87. Voeltz, E. F. K., & Kilian-Hatz, C. (2001). Ideophones. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/tsl.44
88. Watanabe, J., & Sakamoto, M. (2012). Comparison between onomatopoeias and adjectives for evaluating tactile sensations. Proceedings of SCIS-ISIS2012, 2346-2348.
89. Watanabe, J., Utsunomiya, Y., Tsukurimichi, H., & Sakamoto, M. (2012). Relationship between phonemes and tactile-emotional evaluations in Japanese sound symbolic words. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2517-2522). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
90. Waugh, L. R. (1994). Degrees of iconicity in the lexicon. Journal of Pragmatics, 22, 55-70. doi: 10.1016/0378-2166 (94) 90056-6
91. Wichmann, S., Holman, E. W., & Brown, C. H. (2010). Sound symbolism in basic vocabulary. Entropy, 12, 844-858. doi: 10.3390/e12040844
92. Wickham, H., & Francois, R. (2015). dplyr: A grammar of data manipulation. R package version 0.4.2.
93. Winter, B. (2016a). Taste and smell words form an affectively loaded and emotionally flexible part of the English lexicon. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31, 975-988. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2016.1193619
94. Winter, B. (2016b). The sensory structure of the English lexicon. PhD thesis, University of California Merced.
95. Yoshino, J., Yakata, A., Shimizu, Y., Haginoya, M., & Sakamoto, M. (2013). Method of evaluating metal textures by the sound symbolism of onomatopoeia. In The Second Asian Conference on Information Systems (pp. 618-624).