A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship.

Introduction: This paper presents a cross-linguistic study of sound symbolism, analysing a six-language corpus of all Pokémon names available as of January 2022. It tests the effects of labial consonants and voiced plosives on a Pokémon attribute known as friendship. Friendship is a mechanic in the core series of Pokémon video games that arguably reflects how friendly each Pokémon is. Method: Poisson regression is used to examine the relationship between the friendship mechanic and the number of times /p/, /b/, /d/, /m/, /g/, and /w/ occur in the names of English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, and French Pokémon. Results: Bilabial plosives, /p/ and /b/, typically represent high friendship values in Pokémon names while /m/, /d/, and /g/ typically represent low friendship values. No association is found for /w/ in any language. Discussion: Many of the previously known cases of cross-linguistic sound symbolic patterns can be explained by the relationship between how sounds in words are articulated and the physical qualities of the referents. This study, however, builds upon the underexplored relationship between sound symbolism and abstract qualities.

Random forests, sound symbolism and Pokémon evolution.

This study constructs machine learning algorithms that are trained to classify samples using sound symbolism, and then it reports on an experiment designed to measure their understanding against human participants. Random forests are trained using the names of Pokémon, which are fictional video game characters, and their evolutionary status. Pokémon undergo evolution when certain in-game conditions are met. Evolution changes the appearance, abilities, and names of Pokémon. In the first experiment, we train three random forests using the sounds that make up the names of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Pokémon to classify Pokémon into pre-evolution and post-evolution categories. We then train a fourth random forest using the results of an elicitation experiment whereby Japanese participants named previously unseen Pokémon. In Experiment 2, we reproduce those random forests with name length as a feature and compare the performance of the random forests against humans in a classification experiment whereby Japanese participants classified the names elicited in Experiment 1 into pre-and post-evolution categories. Experiment 2 reveals an issue pertaining to overfitting in Experiment 1 which we resolve using a novel cross-validation method. The results show that the random forests are efficient learners of systematic sound-meaning correspondence patterns and can classify samples with greater accuracy than the human participants.

Speaking rate normalization across different talkers in the perception of Japanese stop and vowel length contrasts.

Perception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. However, to what extent this speaking rate normalization is talker-specific is understudied. This experiment investigated whether Japanese listeners' perception of temporally contrastive phonemes is influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context, and more importantly, whether the effect of the contextual speaking rate persists across different talkers for different types of contrasts: a singleton-geminate stop contrast and short-long vowel contrast in Japanese. The results suggest that listeners generalized their rate-based adjustments to different talkers' speech regardless of whether the target contrasts depended on silent closure duration or vowel duration. Our results thus support the view that speaking rate normalization is an obligatory process that happens in the early phase of perception.

The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems.

The bouba/kiki effect-the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape-is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki. Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki. These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)'.

More on the articulation of devoiced [u] in Tokyo Japanese: effects of surrounding consonants.

Past work investigating the lingual articulation of devoiced vowels in Tokyo Japanese has revealed optional but categorical deletion. Some devoiced vowels retained a full lingual target, just like their voiced counterparts, whereas others showed trajectories that are best modelled as targetless, i.e., linear interpolation between the surrounding vowels. The current study explored the hypothesis that this probabilistic deletion is modulated by the identity of the surrounding consonants. A new EMA experiment with an extended stimulus set replicates the core finding of Shaw, Jason & Shigeto Kawahara. 2018b. The lingual gesture of devoiced [u] in Japanese. Journal of Phonetics 66. 100-119. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2017.09.007 that Japanese devoiced [u] sometimes lacks a tongue body raising gesture. The current results moreover show that surrounding consonants do indeed affect the probability of tongue dorsum targetlessness. We found that deletion of devoiced vowels is affected by the place of articulation of the preceding consonant; deletion is more likely following a coronal fricative than a labial fricative. Additionally, we found that the manner combination of the flanking consonants, fricative-fricative versus fricative-stop, also has an effect, at least for some speakers; however, unlike the effect of C1 place, the direction of the manner combination effect varies across speakers with some deleting more often in fricative-stop environments and others more often in fricative-fricative environments.

English Speakers Can Infer Pokémon Types Based on Sound Symbolism.

Sound symbolism, systematic associations between sounds and meanings, is receiving increasing attention in linguistics, psychology and related disciplines. One general question that is currently explored in this research is what sorts of semantic properties can be symbolically represented. Against this background, within the general research paradigm which explores the nature of sound symbolism using Pokémon names, several recent studies have shown that Japanese speakers associate certain classes of sounds with notions that are as complex as Pokémon types. Specifically, Japanese speakers associate (1) sibilants with the flying type, (2) voiced obstruents with the dark type, and (3) labial consonants with the fairy type. These sound symbolic effects arguably have their roots in the phonetic properties of the sounds at issue, and hence are not expected to be specific to Japanese. The current study thus addressed the question whether these sound symbolic associations hold with native speakers of English. Two experiments show that these sound symbolic patterns were very robustly observed when the stimuli were presented in pairs; when the stimuli were presented in isolation, the effects were also tangible, although not as robust. We conclude that English speakers can associate certain types of sounds with particular Pokémon types, with an important caveat that we observed a clear task effect. Overall the current results lend some credibility to the hypothesis that those attributes that play a role in Pokémons' survival are actively signaled by sound symbolism.

Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures.

Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizations could have played a similar role. We report the first extensive cross-cultural study investigating whether people from diverse linguistic backgrounds can understand novel vocalizations for a range of meanings. In two comprehension experiments, we tested whether vocalizations produced by English speakers could be understood by listeners from 28 languages from 12 language families. Listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested. Our findings challenge the often-cited idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation, demonstrating that in the absence of words people can use vocalizations to communicate a variety of meanings.

Japanese Perceptual Epenthesis is Modulated by Transitional Probability.

Perceptual epenthesis is the perception of illusory vowels in consonantal sequences that violate native phonotactics. The consensus has been that each language has a single, predictable candidate for perceptual epenthesis, that vowel which is most minimal (i.e., shortest and/or quietest). However, recent studies have shown that alternate epenthetic vowels can be perceived when the perceptual epenthesis of the minimal vowel would violate native co-occurrence restrictions. We propose a potential explanation for these observed patterns: speech perception, and thus also vowel perceptual epenthesis, is modulated by transitional probability whereby epenthetic vowels must conform to the language specific expectations of the listener. To test this explanation, we present two experiments examining perceptual epenthesis of two Japanese vowels-/u/ and /i/-against their transitional probability in CV sequences. In Experiment 1, Japanese listeners assigned VCCV tokens to VCuCV and VCiCV categories. In Experiment 2, participants discriminated VCCV tokens from VCuCV and VCiCV tokens. The results show that sequences where /i/ is transitionally probable are more likely to elicit /i/ perceptual epenthesis.

Visual and Proprioceptive Perceptions Evoke Motion-Sound Symbolism: Different Acceleration Profiles Are Associated With Different Types of Consonants.

A growing body of literature has shown that one perceptual modality can be systematically associated with sensation in another. However, the cross-modal relationship between linguistic sounds and motions (i.e., motion-sound symbolism) is an extremely understudied area of research. Against this background, this paper examines the cross-modal correspondences between categories of consonants on one hand and different acceleration profiles of motion stimuli on the other. In the two experiments that we conducted, we mechanically manipulated the acceleration profiles of the stimuli while holding the trajectory paths constant, thus distinguishing the effect of acceleration profiles from that of motion path shapes. The results show that different acceleration profiles can be associated with different types of consonants; in particular, movements with acceleration and deceleration tend to be associated with a class of sounds called obstruents, whereas movements without much acceleration tend to be associated with a class of sounds called sonorants. Moreover, the current experiments show that this sort of cross-modal correspondence arises even when the stimuli are not presented visually, namely, when the participants' hands were moved passively by a manipulandum. In conclusion, the present study adds an additional piece of evidence demonstrating that bodily action-based information, i.e., proprioception as a very feasible candidate, could lead to sound symbolic patterns.

Gotta Name'em All: an Experimental Study on the Sound Symbolism of Pokémon Names in Brazilian Portuguese.

Sound-symbolic patterns which relate to the perception of size were found to motivate the behavior of English and Japanese speakers in the naming of pre- and post-evolution Pokémon. The current study builds from this finding and investigates which sound-symbolic association speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) employ to name Pokémon characters. Results from 3 experiments show that vowel quality, phonological length and voiced obstruents, usually used to signal differences in size, are used to signal differences in evolution; however, the effects of voiced obstruents are not identical to what was previously observed in the behavior of Japanese speakers. We argue that although there is a universal sound symbolism associated with these sounds and the perception of largeness, its manifestation differs cross-linguistically. To the best of our knowledge, this is one the first experimental research to investigate sound symbolism and the perception of size in BP.

Effects of Surprisal and Entropy on Vowel Duration in Japanese.

Research on English and other languages has shown that syllables and words that contain more information tend to be produced with longer duration. This research is evolving into a general thesis that speakers articulate linguistic units with more information more robustly. While this hypothesis seems plausible from the perspective of communicative efficiency, previous support for it has come mainly from English and some other Indo-European languages. Moreover, most previous studies focus on global effects, such as the interaction of word duration and sentential/semantic predictability. The current study is focused at the level of phonotactics, exploring the effects of local predictability on vowel duration in Japanese, using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. To examine gradient consonant-vowel phonotactics within a consonant-vowel-mora, consonant-conditioned Surprisal and Shannon Entropy were calculated, and their effects on vowel duration were examined, together with other linguistic factors that are known from previous research to affect vowel duration. Results show significant effects of both Surprisal and Entropy, as well as notable interactions with vowel length and vowel quality. The effect of Entropy is stronger on peripheral vowels than on central vowels. Surprisal has a stronger positive effect on short vowels than on long vowels. We interpret the main patterns and the interactions by conceptualizing Surprisal as an index of motor fluency and Entropy as an index of competition in vowel selection.

Sound Symbolic Patterns in Pokémon Names.

This paper presents a case study of sound symbolism, cases in which certain sounds tend to be associated with particular meanings. We used the corpus of all Japanese Pokémon names available as of October 2016. We tested the effects of voiced obstruents, mora counts, and vowel quality on Pokémon characters' size, weight, strength parameters, and evolution levels. We found that the number of voiced obstruents in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and general strength parameters, except for speed. We argue that this result is compatible with the frequency code hypothesis of Ohala. The number of moras in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and all strength parameters. Vowel height is also shown to have an influence on size and weight - Pokémon characters with initial high vowels tend to be smaller and lighter, although the effect size is not very large. Not only does this paper offer a new case study of sound symbolism, it provides evidence that sound symbolism is at work when naming proper nouns.

Durational compensation within a CV mora in spontaneous Japanese: Evidence from the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese.

Previous experimental studies showed that in Japanese, vowels are longer after shorter onset consonants; there is durational compensation within a CV-mora. In order to address whether this compensation occurs in natural speech, this study re-examines this observation using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. The results, which are based on more than 200 000 CV-mora tokens, show that there is a negative correlation between the onset consonant and the following vowel in terms of their duration. The statistical significance of this negative correlation is assessed by a traditional correlation analysis as well as a bootstrap resampling analysis, which both show that it is unlikely that the observed compensation effect occurred by chance. The compensation is not perfect, however, suggesting that it is a stochastic tendency rather than an absolute principle. This paper closes with a discussion of potential factors that may interact with the durational compensation effect.

Takete and Maluma in Action: A Cross-Modal Relationship between Gestures and Sounds.

Despite Saussure's famous observation that sound-meaning relationships are in principle arbitrary, we now have a substantial body of evidence that sounds themselves can have meanings, patterns often referred to as "sound symbolism". Previous studies have found that particular sounds can be associated with particular meanings, and also with particular static visual shapes. Less well studied is the association between sounds and dynamic movements. Using a free elicitation method, the current experiment shows that several sound symbolic associations between sounds and dynamic movements exist: (1) front vowels are more likely to be associated with small movements than with large movements; (2) front vowels are more likely to be associated with angular movements than with round movements; (3) obstruents are more likely to be associated with angular movements than with round movements; (4) voiced obstruents are more likely to be associated with large movements than with small movements. All of these results are compatible with the results of the previous studies of sound symbolism using static images or meanings. Overall, the current study supports the hypothesis that particular dynamic motions can be associated with particular sounds. Building on the current results, we discuss a possible practical application of these sound symbolic associations in sports instructions.

The 'whistled' fricative in Xitsonga: its articulation and acoustics.

The present study examines the articulation and acoustics of the typologically rare and understudied 'whistled' fricative sound in Xitsonga, a Southern Bantu language. Using ultrasound imaging and video recording, we examine the lingual and labial articulation of the whistled fricative. For the acoustic analysis, we employ the multitaper spectral analysis, which ensures reliable spectral estimates. The results revealed an interplay between multiple articulators involved in the production of the sound: the retroflex lingual gesture and the narrowing of the lower lip toward the upper teeth. Acoustically, the spectra of the whistled fricative are more peaked and compact than the acoustically similar palatoalveolar fricative, and the differences manifest themselves most clearly in two acoustic parameters, dynamic amplitude (Ad) and M2 (variance). The acoustic differences are also manifested in F2 and F3 in the surrounding vowels. Additionally, the 'whistled' fricative in Xitsonga is not quite whistled, contrary to the label given to the sound in previous studies. Building on the current articulatory and acoustic results, we discuss two different aerodynamic models for the whistled fricatives in Southern Bantu languages and conclude that the whistled fricative in Xitsonga is best characterized as a retroflex segment accompanied by weak whistling.

Context effects as auditory contrast.

Three experiments are reported that collectively show that listeners perceive speech sounds as contrasting auditorily with neighboring sounds. Experiment 1 replicates the well-established finding that listeners categorize more of a [d-g] continuum as [g] after [l] than after [r]. Experiments 2 and 3 show that listeners discriminate stimuli in which the energy concentrations differ in frequency between the spectra of neighboring sounds better than those in which they do not differ. In Experiment 2, [alga-arda] pairs, in which the energy concentrations in the liquid-stop sequences are H(igh) L(ow)-LH, were more discriminable than [alda-arga] pairs, in which they are HH-LL. In Experiment 3, [da] and [ga] syllables were more easily discriminated when they were preceded by lower and higher pure tones, respectively-that is, tones that differed from the stops' higher and lower F3 onset frequencies-than when they were preceded by H and L pure tones with similar frequencies. These discrimination results show that contrast with the target's context exaggerates its perceived value when energy concentrations differ in frequency between the target's spectrum and its context's spectrum. Because contrast with its context does more that merely shift the criterion for categorizing the target, it cannot be produced by neural adaptation. The finding that nonspeech contexts exaggerate the perceived values of speech targets also rules out compensation for coarticulation by showing that their values depend on the proximal auditory qualities evoked by the stimuli's acoustic properties, rather than the distal articulatory gestures.

Production and perception of listener-oriented clear speech in child language.

In this paper, we ask whether children are sensitive to the needs of their interlocutor, and, if so, whether they - like adults - modify acoustic characteristics of their speech as part of a communicative goal. In a production task, preschoolers participated in a word learning task that favored the use of clear speech. Children produced vowels that were longer, more intense, more dispersed in the vowel space, and had a more expanded F0 range than normal speech. Two perception studies with adults showed that these acoustic differences were perceptible and were used to distinguish normal and clear speech styles. We conclude that preschoolers are sensitive to aspects of the speaker-hearer relationship calling upon them to modify their speech in ways that benefit their listener.

Auditory contrast versus compensation for coarticulation: data from Japanese and English listeners.

English listeners categorize more of a [k-t] continuum as "t" after [character: see text] than [s] (Mann & Repp, 1981). This bias could be due to compensation for coarticulation (Mann & Repp, 1981) or auditory contrast between the fricatives and the stops (Lotto & Kluender, 1998). In Japanese, surface [[character: see text]k, [character: see text] t, sk, st] clusters arise via palatalization and vowel devoicing from /sik, sit, suk, sut/, and acoustic vestiges of the devoiced vowels remain in the fricative. On the one hand, compensation for coarticulation with the devoiced vowel would cancel out compensation for coarticulation with the fricative, and listeners would not show any response bias. On the other hand, if the stop contrasts spectrally with the fricative, listeners should respond "t" more often after [[character: see text] i] than [s[character: see text]]. Experiment I establishes that [k] and [t] coarticulate with preceding voiced [i, u], voiceless [[character: see text], [character: see text]], and [[character: see text], s]. Experiment 2 shows that both Japanese and English listeners respond "t" more often after [characters: see text] than [s[character: see text]], as predicted by auditory contrast. English listeners' "t" responses also varied after voiced vowels, but those of Japanese listeners did not. Experiment 3 shows that this difference reflects differences in their phonetic experience.

Contextual Effects on the Perception of Duration.

In the experiments reported here, listeners categorized and discriminated speech and non-speech analogue stimuli in which the durations of a vowel and a following consonant or their analogues were varied orthogonally. The listeners' native languages differed in how these durations covary in speakers' productions of such sequences. Because auditorist and autonomous models of speech perception hypothesize that the auditory qualities evoked by both kinds of stimuli determine their initial perceptual evaluation, they both predict that listeners from all the languages will respond similarly to non-speech analogues as they do to speech in both tasks. Because neither direct realist nor interactive models hypothesize such a processing stage, they predict instead that in the way in which vowel and consonant duration covary in the listeners' native languages will determine how they categorize and discriminate the speech stimuli, and that all listeners will categorize and discriminate the non-speech differently from the speech stimuli. Listeners' categorization of the speech stimuli did differ as a function of how these durations covary in their native languages, but all listeners discriminated the speech stimuli in the same way, and they all categorized and discriminated the non-speech stimuli in the same way, too. These similarities could arise from listeners adding the durations of the vowel and consonant intervals (or their analogues) in these tasks with these stimuli; they do so when linguistic experience does not influence them to perceive these durations otherwise. These results support an autonomous rather than interactive model in which listeners either add or apply their linguistic experience at a post-perceptual stage of processing. They do not however support an auditorist over a direct realist model because they provide no evidence that the signal's acoustic properties are transformed during the hypothesized prior perceptual stage.

The intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese: evidence for intonational phrase and utterance.

In previous studies of Japanese intonational phonology, levels of prosodic constituents above the Major Phrase have not received much attention. This paper argues that at least two prosodic levels exist above the Major Phrase in Japanese. Through a detailed investigation of the intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese, we argue that each syntactic clause projects its own Intonational Phrase, while an entire sentence constitutes one Utterance. We show that the Intonational Phrase is characterized by tonal lowering, creakiness and a pause in final position, as well as a distinctive large initial rise and pitch reset at its beginning. The Utterance defines a domain of declination, and it is signaled by an even larger initial rise, as well as a phrasal H tone at its right edge. Building on our empirical findings, we discuss several implications for the theory of intonational phonology.