title: Sound symbolic naming of novel objects is a graded function.
abstract: Although linguistic traditions of the last century assumed that there is no link between sound and meaning (i.e., arbitrariness), recent research has established a nonarbitrary relation between sound and meaning (i.e., sound symbolism). For example, some sounds (e.g., /u/ as in took) suggest bigness whereas others (e.g., /i/ as in tiny) suggest smallness. We tested whether sound symbolism only marks contrasts (e.g., small versus big things) or whether it marks object properties in a graded manner (e.g., small, medium, and large things). In two experiments, participants viewed novel objects (i.e., greebles) of varying size and chose the most appropriate name for each object from a list of visually or auditorily presented nonwords that varied incrementally in the number of "large" and "small" phonemes. For instance, "wodolo" contains all large-sounding phonemes, whereas "kitete" contains all small-sounding phonemes. Participants' choices revealed a graded relationship between sound and size: The size of the object linearly predicted the number of large-sounding phonemes in its preferred name. That is, small, medium, and large objects elicited names with increasing numbers of large-sounding phonemes. The results are discussed in relation to cross-modal processing, gesture, and vocal pitch.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. Patrick.Thompson@warwick.ac.uk
authors: Patrick D
authors: PD
authors: Thompson
authors: Zachary
authors: Z
authors: Estes
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013016:Sound; D013561:Symbolism; D055815:Young Adult