Cross-modal iconicity: A cognitive semiotic approach to sound symbolism
By Felix Ahlner, Jordan Zlatev. 2010
130 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It is being increasingly recognized that the Saussurean dictum of "the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign" is in conflict with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon commonly known as "sound symbolism". After first presenting a historical overview of the debate, however, we conclude that both positions have been exaggerated, and that an adequate explanation of sound symbolism is still lacking. How can there, for example, be (perceived) similarity between expressions and contents across different sensory modalities? We offer an answer, based on the Peircian notion of iconic ground, and G. Sonesson's distinction between primary and secondary iconicity. Furthermore, we describe an experimental study, in a paradigm first pioneered by W. Kohler, and recently popularized by V. Ramachandran, in which we varied vowels and consonants in fictive word-forms, and conclude that both types of sounds play a role in perceiving an iconic ground between the word-forms and visual figures. The combination of historical conceptual analysis, semiotic explication and psychological experimentation presented in this article is characteristic of the emerging paradigm of cognitive semiotics.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62e168e1fbb77e7a65f3c65f4fb37d8ba5e98311
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Language and Linguistics
Citations in the corpus
- Phonetic Detail and Dimensionality in Sound-shape Correspondences: Refining the Bouba-Kiki Paradigm (2014, background): “…symbolic effects: in one study, when a word contained both vowels and consonants that were independently matched with a rounded shape, an individual was more likely to match the word to a rounded shape than if the vowels and consonants operated in incongruent directions (Ahlner & Zlatev, 2010).”
- Advances in the Cross-Linguistic Study of Ideophones (2012, background): “A true semantic typology of ideophone systems is coming within reach through a combination of language-internal analyses and language-independent elicitation tools.”
- Mappings between linguistic sound and motion (2013, methodology): “Given a choice of two nonsense words and two shapes, people share preferences to pair, for example, angular shapes, with words like takete and kiki (see also Ahlner and Zlatev, 2010; Nielsen and Rendall, 2011; Monaghan, Mattock, and Walker, 2012).”