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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
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Size-Sound Iconicity in English-Like Pseudowords Influences Referent Labeling and Prosody
Leonardo Michelini1, Lynne C Nygaard1
1Cognitive and Computational Sciences, Emory University.
Cognitive Science
|February 10, 2025
Summary
Sound symbolism, or iconicity, influences how people perceive and produce speech. This study found that pseudowords evoking size influenced participants' prosody, demonstrating sensitivity to sound-size mappings in spoken language.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Phonetics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Speech sounds can convey perceptual information via iconicity, a resemblance between sound and meaning.
- Prosody, including pitch and intensity, can evoke physical features of referents to communicate meaning.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if iconicity between pseudoword form and object properties affects pronunciation.
- To determine if congruent label-referent mappings elicit iconic prosodic modulation.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Assessed size-sound iconicity by having participants match pseudowords (small-sounding, ambiguous, big-sounding) to animal figures of varying sizes.
- Experiment 2: Examined how iconic mappings influenced vocal production by having participants pronounce pseudowords paired with referents of specific sizes.
Main Results:
- Participants preferentially matched small-sounding pseudowords to small referents and big-sounding pseudowords to big referents.
- Vocal prosody reflected the size evoked by the pseudowords themselves, rather than the specific label-referent relationship.
Conclusions:
- Language users are sensitive to sound-to-size iconicity in spoken language.
- This sensitivity modulates speech production, influencing prosody based on the inherent sound symbolism of words.
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