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Action sound-shape congruencies explain sound symbolism.
Konstantina Margiotoudi1,2, Friedemann Pulvermüller3,4,5,6
1Brain Language Laboratory, Department of Philosophy and Humanities, WE4, Freie Universität Berlin, 14195, Berlin, Germany. konstantina.margiotoudi@fu-berlin.de.
Scientific Reports
|July 31, 2020
Summary
Sound symbolism links meaningless words to abstract shapes. This study reveals these connections stem from the sounds and shapes of bodily actions, explaining this human-specific knowledge.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Sound symbolism describes the semantic link between pseudowords and abstract shapes.
- This phenomenon is a human-specific knowledge domain that remains largely unexplained.
- Existing theories lack a comprehensive explanation for the origins of sound symbolic associations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether abstract sound symbolic links can be explained by the relationship between sounds and shapes of bodily actions.
- To explore the role of action knowledge in understanding sound symbolism.
- To determine if audiovisual information from action experiences underlies sound symbolic associations.
Main Methods:
- Human subjects were tasked with matching pseudowords to abstract shapes.
- Participants also matched action sounds to the shapes of their corresponding action trajectories.
- Experiments included crossed conditions to analyze interactions between sound symbolism and action domains.
Main Results:
- Concordant matching was observed between the sound symbolic and action domains.
- Significant correlations were found between sound symbolic matching and action-based shape matching.
- Findings indicate a shared mechanism underlying both phenomena.
Conclusions:
- Abstract sound symbolism is explained by audiovisual information inherent in action experiences.
- Acoustic similarities between speech sounds and action sounds contribute to sound symbolism.
- Action knowledge plays a fundamental role in abstract sound symbolism, potentially influencing human symbol-manipulation abilities.
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