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Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages.

  • Blasi DE Department of Comparative Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Laboratory, University of Zürich, CH-8006 Zurich, Switzerland; Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, 07745 Jena, Germany; Discrete Biomathematics Group, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; damianblasi@gmail.com.
  • Wichmann S University of Leiden, 2311 BV Leiden, The Netherlands; Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia, 420000;
  • Hammarström H Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, 07745 Jena, Germany;
  • Stadler PF Discrete Biomathematics Group, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany; Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics, Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, 04107 Leipzig, Germany; Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501;
  • Christiansen MH Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853; Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
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  • 2016-09-14
Published in:
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. - 2016
cognitive sciences
iconicity
language evolution
linguistics
sound symbolism
Automation
Bias
Geography
Internationality
Judgment
Language
Sound
English It is widely assumed that one of the fundamental properties of spoken language is the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning. Some exceptions in the form of nonarbitrary associations have been documented in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, but these studies only involved small subsets of the 6,000+ languages spoken in the world today. By analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world's languages, we demonstrate that a considerable proportion of 100 basic vocabulary items carry strong associations with specific kinds of human speech sounds, occurring persistently across continents and linguistic lineages (linguistic families or isolates). Prominently among these relations, we find property words ("small" and i, "full" and p or b) and body part terms ("tongue" and l, "nose" and n). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species' unique communication system.
Language
  • English
Open access status
bronze
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https://sonar.ch/global/documents/161494
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