Prominence effects in vocal iconicity: Implications for lexical access and language changea).

This paper explores how three cognitive and perceptual cues, vocal iconicity, resemblance-based mappings between form and meaning, and segment position and lexical stress, interact to affect word formation and language processing. The study combines an analysis of the word-internal positions that iconic segments occur in based on data from 245 language families with an experimental study in which participants representing more than 30 languages rated iconic and non-iconic pseudowords. The pseudowords were designed to systematically vary segment and stress placement across syllables. The results for study 1 indicate that segments used iconically appear approximately 0.26 segment positions closer toward the beginning of words compared to non-iconic segments. In study 2, it was found that iconic segments occurring in stressed syllables and non-iconic segments occurring in the second syllable were rated as significantly more fitting. These findings suggest that the interplay between vocal iconicity and prominence effects increases the predictive function of iconic segments by foregrounding sounds, which intrinsically carry semantic information. Consequently, these results contribute to the understanding of the widespread occurrence of vocal iconicity in human languages.

Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?

Italian is sexy, German is rough-but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within ±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features-the presence of specific phonemic classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener's first language-were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic preferences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker's voice quality, and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly.

Preferred sound groups of vocal iconicity reflect evolutionary mechanisms of sound stability and first language acquisition: evidence from Eurasia.

In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form-meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and 'blind' to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates with iconic occurrence in the global set. Further, we find that sound stability and iconic occurrence of consonants are connected to acquisition order in the first language, indicating that children acquiring language play a role in maintaining vocal iconicity over time. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.