Hence the sensitivity to sound symbolism in early life is an open issue. A recent meta analysis 16 concluded that it is still unclear whether preverbal infants are capable of sound symbolic matching. However, Fort and colleagues 15 found no such evidence in 5 and 6-months old infants tested in a preferential looking paradigm. A sequential looking time study found that 4-month-old infants looked longer at incongruent correspondences between shape and sound than to congruent ones 14. In contrast to these results from children already knowing some language, evidence for sound symbolic matching in preverbal infants is less conclusive. different actor performing the action), when the novel learned verbs sound-symbolically matched the described action during the learning phase. Based on their findings, children performed better on generalizing the novel verbs to the same actions but in different contexts (e.g. In both studies, children learned novel verbs that sound-symbolically matched or did not match different actions. Other studies tested whether sound symbolism facilitates verb learning and found positive evidence in 25-month-old Japanese 12 and 3-years old English children 13. For example, Maurer and colleagues 11 have shown that 2.5 years old children matched oral sounds to shapes. Sound symbolism has been claimed to facilitate language acquisition and development. Although cross-modal sound symbolic relationships replicate across a wide range of experiments in human adults or children with variable language backgrounds using different stimuli, it still appears as a mystery why a majority of human subjects agree that certain speech items sound ‘rounder’ or ‘edgier’, and why certain visual and acoustic stimuli intuitively match with each other. Instead of “sound symbolism”, other terms have been used, for example “phonetic symbolism” 4 or “crossmodal iconicity” 5.Ī number of studies have documented sound-meaning mappings in speakers of a broad range of languages 6, including South East Asian languages 7, African languages 8, Balto-Finnic 9 and Indo-European 10, thus ruling out language specificity as a possible factor. Köhler 3, who discovered sound symbolism, had reporting that the pseudoword ‘maluma’ was judged to be a good match to a curved shape whereas the pseudoword ‘takete’ was judged as better match to an angular shape. Sound symbolism describes the phenomenon that humans match pronouncable but meaningless pseudowords to specific visual shapes. A classic example of non-arbitrariness in human language is sound symbolism. There has been a long debate in semantics as to whether the relationship between form and meaning of a sign is entirely arbitrary or not 1, 2. These results suggest that the ability to detect sound symbolic correspondences is the outcome of a phylogenetic process, whose underlying emerging mechanism may be relevant to symbolic ability more generally. In a forced choice matching task, humans but not great apes, showed crossmodal sound symbolic congruency effects, whereby effects were more pronounced for shape selections following round-sounding primes than following edgy-sounding primes. In the present study, we administered the classic “takete-maluma” paradigm in both humans (N = 24 and N = 31) and great apes (N = 8). Although sound symbolism has been studied extensively in humans including young children and infants, it has never been investigated in non-human primates lacking language. ‘takete’ and abstract curved and angular shapes. One important manifestation of iconicity is sound symbolism, the intrinsic relationship between meaningless speech sounds and visual shapes, as exemplified by the famous correspondences between the pseudowords ‘maluma’ vs. Theories on the evolution of language highlight iconicity as one of the unique features of human language.
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