Do Sounds Carry Their Own Meanings? Onomatopoeia and Arbitrariness of the Sign

Описание: How much meaning is there just in sounds? How much are words alike across languages? In this week's episode, we talk about the arbitrariness of the sign: how our sounds don't have to connect to the meanings they do, how much cases like onomatopoeia serve as a counter to the random matching of words, and whether individual sounds or syllables carry their own semantic punch.

This is Topic #67!

This week's tag language: Māori!

Related videos:
Following the Signs: How Do We Learn Words? -    • Word Learning  

Last episode:
Desert Island Words: What Questions Can't You Ask? -    • What Questions Can't We Ask? Syntactic Isl...  

Other of our psycholinguistics videos:
Follow My Eyes: What Can Our Eyes Tell Us About Language? -    • What Can Our Eyes Tell Us About Language? ...  
Walking the Garden Path: How Do We Interpret Sentences? -    • How Do We Interpret Sentences? Parsing Str...  
Prime Time: How Are Words Connected in Our Minds? -    • How Are Words Connected in our Minds? Priming  

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Spanish subtitles by Federico Falletti

Sources:
The initial discussion of the arbitrariness of the sign is from:
de Saussure, F. (1916). Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris, 1983.
There's a good discussion of the concepts on the Wikipedia page regarding the book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_...

If you are interested in cross-linguistic onomatopoeia and also very cute pictures, try:
  / soundimals  
  / chapmangamo  

The Dutch/Japanese ideophone study:
Lockwood, G., M. Dingemanse, & P. Hagoort (2016). Sound-symbolism boosts novel word learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
(Full paper available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000235)

The initial studies for the sound symbolism / phonesthetics with molmo and ikitik:
Köhler, W (1929). Gestalt Psychology. (We consulted the 1947 second edition.)

These shapes are often known as "kiki" and "bouba", from the following study:
Ramachandran, V. S., and E. M. Hubbard. (2001). Synaesthesia—a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, 3–34.

There's a good and accessible overview of the state of this research in:
Lockwood, G. & M. Dingemanse. (2015). Iconicity in the Lab: A Review of Behavioral, Developmental, and Neuroimaging Research into Sound-Symbolism. Language Sciences, 1246. (full paper to be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015....)

An interesting article about product names and how they happen: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

Looking forward to next week!