Effects of pitch of short pure tones on onomatopoeic expressions: A cross-linguistic study of Japanese and Chinese

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of the pitch of short-duration pure tones on onomatopoeic expressions, as well as the common relationships between frequency and onomatopoeic expressions. The sound stimuli were 85 pure tones (duration: 240 ms) that spanned 7 octaves from 62.5 Hz to 8 kHz in 1/12-octave steps. The participants were randomly presented with each material twice and were told to write or choose what they heard using an onomatopoeic expression. The results indicated that the participants tend to use /u/ or /o/ for low frequencies and /i/ for high frequencies, and the distribution of vowels tends to be similar for speakers of different languages. Therefore, in vowels, there are common relationships between the pitch of pure tones and onomatopoeic expressions.