In his seminal book entitled “Gestalt Psychology”, Köhler 3 described the classic “maluma–takete” paradigm in which humans match a round figure to a ‘round’ sounding pseudoword, such as “maluma”, and a sharp figure to a ‘sharp’ sounding pseudoword such as “takete”, thus presupposing an abstract ‘resemblance’ between the otherwise meaningless symbol (pseudoword) and the corresponding shape, possibly based on shared modality general abstract properties. In the present study, the term “sound symbolism” will refer to these latter associations. The iconic links between pseudowords and abstract visual shapes is the most popular demonstration of this phenomenon. Sound symbolism is an umbrella term that covers the non-arbitrary associations between meaningless speech sounds and sensory or other meanings 1 (for a review see 2). These results demonstrate a fundamental role of action knowledge for abstract sound symbolism, which may have been key to human symbol-manipulation ability. We conclude that the sound symbolic knowledge interlinking speech sounds and abstract shapes is explained by audiovisual information immanent to action experience along with acoustic similarities between speech and action sounds. Our findings reveal concordant matching in the sound symbolic and action domains, and, importantly, significant correlations between them. Crucially, both conditions were also crossed.
To this end, we asked human subjects to match pseudowords with abstract shapes and, in a different experimental block, the sounds of actions with the shapes of the trajectories of the actions causing these same sounds. Here we explore whether abstract sound symbolic links can be explained by those between the sounds and shapes of bodily actions.
sharp) shapes, is a hitherto unexplained human-specific knowledge domain. (prime with) разг.Sound symbolism, the surprising semantic relationship between meaningless pseudowords (e.g., ‘maluma’, ‘takete’) and abstract (round vs. Info Kebab icon-lamp icon-lampBig icon-learnHat icon-learning-hat Dislike Loup Loup icon-more icon-note icon-notifications icon-pen Pencil icon-play icon-plus-light icon-plus icon-rosie-cut Rune scrollUp Share-icon Shevron-Down Shevron Left Shevron Right sound sound1 sound2 sound3 sound4 sound2 icon-star Swap icon-translate Trash icon-tutor-ellipsis icon-tutor-flip Tutor folder icon icon-tutor-learned icon-twoWayArrow Mezhdunarodny_logotip_VK vk vk-logo icon-word pen_icon Logo Logo Logo
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