Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages.
It is widely assumed that one of the fundamental properties of spoken language is the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning. Some exceptions in the form of nonarbitrary associations have been documented in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, but these studies only involved small subsets of the 6,000+ languages spoken in the world today. By analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world's languages, we demonstrate that a considerable proportion of 100 basic vocabulary items carry strong associations with specific kinds of human speech sounds, occurring persistently across continents and linguistic lineages (linguistic families or isolates). Prominently among these relations, we find property words ("small" and i, "full" and p or b) and body part terms ("tongue" and l, "nose" and n). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species' unique communication system.
Department of Comparative Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Laboratory, University of Zürich, CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland; Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, 07745 Jena, Germany; Discrete Biomathematics Group, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; damianblasi@gmail.com.
Damián E
0000-0002-9885-1414
DE
Blasi
University of Leiden, 2311 BV Leiden, The Netherlands; Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia, 420000;
Søren
S
Wichmann
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, 07745 Jena, Germany;
Harald
H
Hammarström
Discrete Biomathematics Group, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics, Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, 04107 Leipzig, Germany; Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501;
Peter F
0000-0002-5016-5191
PF
Stadler
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853; Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Morten H
MH
Christiansen
D001331:Automation; D015982:Bias; D005843:Geography; D038622:Internationality; D007600:Judgment; D007802:Language; D013016:Sound
cognitive sciences; iconicity; language evolution; linguistics; sound symbolism