TY - JOUR
T1 - Cross-linguistically shared and language-specific sound symbolism in novel words elicited by locomotion videos in Japanese and English
AU - Saji, Noburo
AU - Akita, Kimi
AU - Kantartzis, Katerina
AU - Kita, Sotaro
AU - Imai, Mutsumi
N1 - Funding Information:
Funded by MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI to Saji (#232913, #26870573, #18K12382), Akita (#24720179, #15K16741), Imai (#15300088, #22243043, #23120003), and Biological Sciences Research Council’s Research Development Fellowship [BB/G023069/1] to Kita.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Saji et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2019/7/1
Y1 - 2019/7/1
N2 - This paper demonstrates a new quantitative approach to examine cross-linguistically shared and language-specific sound symbolism in languages. Unlike most previous studies taking a hypothesis-testing approach, we employed a data mining approach to uncover unknown sound-symbolic correspondences in the domain of locomotion, without limiting ourselves to pre-determined sound-meaning correspondences. In the experiment, we presented 70 locomotion videos to Japanese and English speakers and asked them to create a sound symbolically matching word for each action. Participants also rated each action on five meaning variables. Multivariate analyses revealed cross-linguistically shared and language-specific sound-meaning correspondences within a single semantic domain. The present research also established that a substantial number of sound-symbolic links emerge from conventionalized form-meaning mappings in the native languages of the speakers.
AB - This paper demonstrates a new quantitative approach to examine cross-linguistically shared and language-specific sound symbolism in languages. Unlike most previous studies taking a hypothesis-testing approach, we employed a data mining approach to uncover unknown sound-symbolic correspondences in the domain of locomotion, without limiting ourselves to pre-determined sound-meaning correspondences. In the experiment, we presented 70 locomotion videos to Japanese and English speakers and asked them to create a sound symbolically matching word for each action. Participants also rated each action on five meaning variables. Multivariate analyses revealed cross-linguistically shared and language-specific sound-meaning correspondences within a single semantic domain. The present research also established that a substantial number of sound-symbolic links emerge from conventionalized form-meaning mappings in the native languages of the speakers.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0218707
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0218707
M3 - Article
C2 - 31291274
AN - SCOPUS:85069609476
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 14
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 7
M1 - e0218707
ER -