Center for Multisensory Marketing, Department of Marketing, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway.
Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, United States.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jul 17;7(1):5562. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-05965-y.
Sound symbolism refers to the non-arbitrary mappings that exist between phonetic properties of speech sounds and their meaning. Despite there being an extensive literature on the topic, the acoustic features and psychological mechanisms that give rise to sound symbolism are not, as yet, altogether clear. The present study was designed to investigate whether different sets of acoustic cues predict size and shape symbolism, respectively. In two experiments, participants judged whether a given consonant-vowel speech sound was large or small, round or angular, using a size or shape scale. Visual size judgments were predicted by vowel formant F1 in combination with F2, and by vowel duration. Visual shape judgments were, however, predicted by formants F2 and F3. Size and shape symbolism were thus not induced by a common mechanism, but rather were distinctly affected by acoustic properties of speech sounds. These findings portray sound symbolism as a process that is not based merely on broad categorical contrasts, such as round/unround and front/back vowels. Rather, individuals seem to base their sound-symbolic judgments on specific sets of acoustic cues, extracted from speech sounds, which vary across judgment dimensions.
声音象征主义是指语音的声学属性与其意义之间存在的非任意映射。尽管关于这个主题已经有了广泛的文献，但产生声音象征主义的声学特征和心理机制还不完全清楚。本研究旨在探讨不同的声学线索是否分别预测大小和形状象征意义。在两项实验中，参与者使用大小或形状量表来判断给定的辅音-元音语音是大还是小，是圆还是角。元音第一共振峰 F1 与第二共振峰 F2 的组合以及元音时长可以预测视觉大小判断，而第二和第三共振峰 F2 和 F3 则可以预测视觉形状判断。因此，大小和形状象征意义不是由共同的机制引起的，而是受到语音声学属性的明显影响。这些发现表明，声音象征主义是一个不仅仅基于广泛的类别对比（如圆/不圆和前/后元音）的过程。相反，个体似乎基于从语音中提取的特定声学线索来做出声音象征判断，这些线索在不同的判断维度上有所不同。
