A Verification of Performance of Onomatopoeia Thesaurus Map for Sound-Symbolism on Japanese Vowels

Abstract

Onomatopoeias have an ability to represent sounds or state of things. Onomatopoeias follow sound symbolism that is a hypothesis that particular sound and a phoneme can give people paticular impressin or image. According to this, similar particular sound and phoneme can make people imagine similar particular image. Urata et al. utilized the sound symbolism and proposed an onomatopoeia thesaurus map, which can visualize semantic relationship among onomatopoeias. The onomatopoeia thesaurus map is constructed by output of a middle layer of a deep autoencoder. Urata et al. reported that onomatopoeias in local area of the map can be semantically similar. But it hasn’t been verified that the map can support sound symbolism. Our study formulated a hypothesis based on Japanese linguistic knowledge about the sound symbolism. The experiment evaluated the hypothesis of the map. The most of the experimental result supported the hypothesis, however a part of it didn’t.