Sound Symbolism
Jakubowski Marcin
Markowska Olga
Palak Tomasz
Sędłak Anna
Skijko Katarzyna
Outline
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Research questions
What is sound symbolism?
How it influence on learning?
General characteristic:
De Saussure & Peirce – main ideas
Implicational hierarchy
Iconicity in gestures
Ideophones
Bootstrapping hypothesis
Children’s abilities
Our proposed empirical study
Summary and conclusions
General characteristic
Sound symbolism is an category of linguistics and relates
to the vocal sounds, which have meaning.
Type of sound symbolism:
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Onomatopoeia - sound symbolism is used in
onomatopoeias as object names (e.g. wan-wan, dogs’
barking, to refer to dogs).
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Phonesthemes - clusters of words with similar
meanings, which have the same sounds at the
beginning or the end.
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For instance: several words beginning with ‘gl’ have
meanings related to light: glitter, glare, glow and
glistening.
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Iconism
EXAMPLE OF SOUND SYMBOLISM: Is given by Imai and Kita.
Maluma and takete are presented as labels for a rounded
versus a spikey object, speakers of different languages judged
maluma, to be more appropriate for the rounded object and
takete for the spikey object.
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Ferdinand de Saussure - (1857 - 1913) Swiss linguist. He described
the language as a permanent collection social norms that enable
communication. Distinguished language as a system of signs from
speaking, which is an individual realization of that system. This sign
for the researcher connection concept ("marked", French. Signifier)
and the sound image ("meaning", French. Signified).
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Charles Sanders Peirce - (1839 - 1914) Scientist, American
philosopher. He is creating an extremely rich and complex theory of
the sign. Several elements of his theory found a practical
application and entered a permanent methodology for modern
semiotics.
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Roman Osipowicz Jakobson – (1896 - 1982) Russian linguist, literary
critic and theorist language. In his work he combined literary and
language competence. He developed a typology of phonological
systems. Jakobson claimed about that, the signans and signatum are
the predominance of one the division of signs into icons, indices and
symbols over the others.
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE
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The verbal sign is an indissoluble unity of two constituents-signifie
(meaning) and signifiant (mental representation).
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No link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a
sound pattern – arbitrariness.
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The linguistic sign constitutes one “psychological entity” whose two
parts are intimately conjoined and mutually dependent, each
automatically evoking the other.
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Signs are delimited and defined by their contrast with other signs in
the specific language system. One aim of linguistics should be “to
describe and trace the history of all observable languages”.
Arbitrary
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The notion of the ‘arbitrary sign’ suggests a relationship
between signifier and signified where there is no apparent
reason why a specific form should signify a specific
meaning. With a focus on language, de Saussure stressed
that the relationship between the sound (or shape) of a
spoken (or written) word and its meaning is ‘arbitrary and
conventional’.
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE
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Three cardinal types of signs: icon, index and symbol
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Object - is what the sign means or as a referent.
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Representamen - is a material form of the Sign.
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Interpretant - is a concept that arises in the mind of the viewer sign.
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Index sign - is one in which the subject and
reprezentamen are connected to a natural relationship.
This relationship may be some subjectively perceived
interdependence.
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Iconic sign - reprezentamen is associated with the object
by likeness in other words form of the sign resembles its
importance.
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Symbolic signs - reprezentamen and object bind only the
convention. People need to learn on memory what which
means a given form.
Implicational hierarchy
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SOUND < MOVEMENT < VISUAL PATTERNS < OTHER SENSORY PERCEPTIONS <
INNER FEELINGS AND COGNITIVE STATS
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“If a language has ideophones for movement it will also
have ideophones for sounds. If a language has ideophones
for visual patterns it will also have ideophones for
movements and sounds. Conersely, a language that does
not have ideophones for sounds or movements will not
have ideophones for cognitive states” (Dingemanse 2012:
663).
Iconicity in gestures
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Iconic gestures guided children to pick out a particular
part of a complex scene as the referent of a novel verb.
E.g. “When 3-year-old English-reared children were
presented with a novel verb and a complex action scene,
along with an iconic gesture, children interpreted the
verb’s referent to be the part of the scene depicted by
the iconic gesture” (Imai & Kita 2014: 10)
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“Sound symbolism has a direct link to iconic
gestures” (Imai & Kita 2014: 10)
Ideophones
“ Ideophones are maked words that depict sensory imagery
in many of the world’s languages” (Dingemanse 2012: 654)
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Easy to identify, difficult to define.
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They are noted for special sound patterns , distinct
properties and sensory meaning.
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Dingemanse: ideophones are defined as marked words
that depictsensory imagery.
Ideophones are
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Words that is
conventionalised minimal
free forms with specifiable
meanings.
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Depictions that is, they are
special in the way they
signify their referents.
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Sensory imagery imagery is
perceptual knowledge that
derives from sensory
perception of the
environment and the body.
Bootstrapping hypothesis
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It claims that sound symbolism provides ascaffolding mechanism for
children in various stages of language development.
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Sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis consists of several related
claims:
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Children are sensitive to sound symbolism.
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“Young children are sensitive to a wider range of possible sound
symbolic correspondences than adults.”
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“Sound symbolism helps infants who have just started word learning to
gain the insight that speech sounds refer to entities in the world.”
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“Sound symbolism helps infants associate speech sounds and their
referents and establish a lexical representation.”
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“Sound symbolism helps toddlers identify referents embedded in a
complex scene.” (Imai & Kita 2014: 4)
Children’s abilities
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- CDS (Child-directed speech) for young children is a way
“that is appropriate for the children’s language
comprehension ability”. (Imai & Kita 2014: 8)
- For children to be able to use a word in new situations,
they need to create a word meaning representation
(tendency to generalisation).
- “Sound symbolism may instead help infants identify the
particular part of an ambiguous scene as the referent”.
(Imai & Kita 2014: 8)
- “Sound symbolism could impede learning of nouns when
the noun vocabulary is sufficiently large”. (Imai & Kita
2014: 9)
Iconicity
ICON (also called likeness and semblance) is a sign that
denotes its object by virtue of a quality which is shared by
them but which the icon has irrespectively of the object
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Primary iconicity: the perception of an iconic ground obtaining
between two things is one of the reasons for positing the existence of
a sign function joining two things together as expression and content.
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Secondary iconicity: the knowledge about the existence of a sign
function between two things functioning as expression and content is
one of the reasons for the perception of an iconic ground between
these same things.
Experiment
PROCEDURE: We have 25 people (men and women) from England,
who don't speak polish and 25 people in the same age from Poland,
who don't speak english. Their task is to adjust two pictures from
examples to two words. For english people polish words to images
and for polish people english phrases to pictures. They must guess
what word belongs to one of pictures. They have 50% chance of
relevancy.
Participants: men and women 20-25 years old
english and polish nationality
number of people – 50
Methods
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We are looking for words, based on the construction of phonetic
character trying to determine the characteristics of the object
signified
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- in some words setting of mouth indicates on icon of picture:
okrąg (english circle) possesses vowel [o], which points on
shape,
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-basing on onomatopoeia, some words include letters, which
refer to it: snake and consonant [s] points on snake's hiss,
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-basing on iconicity, some words in language contain letters,
which can represent things: cup (english) and kubek (polish)
contain vowel [u]. It can indicate shape of real cup.
Hypotheses
H1: some letters in words show the picture of things
H2: in few cases it represents vocality
H3: pronounced letters can copy real things
Examples
Okrąg
Butterfly
Snake
Cup, kubek
Summaring
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Sound symbolism helping children to establish word–
referent associations and also to extract the word
meaning invariance from rich and unsegmented
perceptual information children observe when they hear
a word.
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Sound symbolism provides key insights into how language
develops in children and how language evolved in human
history. It should no longer be considered to be a
peripheral phenomenon in language.
References
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Jakobson, R. ,(1965), Quest for the essence of language. Diogenes13:
21-38.
Dingemanse, M. , (2012), Advances in the cross-linguistic study
of ideophones. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6/10: 654 – 672
Sonesson, G., (2010), From mimicry to mime by way of mimesis:
Reflections on a general theory of iconicity. In Sign Systems Studies
38 (1/4), 18-66
Imai, M., & Kita, S. (2014), The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369: 4 - 10
Zlatev, J., Ahlner, F., (2010), Cross-modal iconicity: A cognitive semiotic
approach to sound symbolism, 298-348