Verification of sound symbolism on onomatopoeia-thesaurus map using XYXY-typed

Abstract

Onomatopoeia can easily describe sounds or state of things. Onomatopoeia is believed to follow sound symbolism. Sound symbolism is a property that particular sound can make people imagine particular impression. Urata et al. focused on sound symbolism and proposed an onomatopoeic thesaurus map to visualize semantic similarity among onomatopoeias. The map is composed of outputs of a middle layer of an autoencoder that has learned sound symbolism. Urata et al. hired small number of limited onomatopoeias to construct the map. Besides that the limited onomatopoeias took not only a XYXY type but various styles. As a result, there is a possibility that the map are only able to visualize limited semantic similarity among onomatopoeias. In this paper, we prepared many XYXY-typed onomatopoeias to construct the autoencoder. Using the autoencoder, the experiment attempted to verify the map regarding visualization of sound symbolism. We formulated a hypothesis regarding sound symbolism based on Japanese linguistic knowledge. Most of the results supported the hypothesis, however some showed a different trend. We discussed on that.