Investigation of acoustic features of God’s name based on Grad-CAM saliency maps

Abstract

The phenomenon in which a specific sound gives a specific image to a person is called sound symbolism. There have been many reports on sound symbolism in linguistics, psychology and other fields. However, the reports have not clarified all of sound symbolism. In order to clarify sound symbols, we would like to collect examples of sound symbolism and investigate by bottom-up analysis. Our study took up God’s name, which is considered to be one of the examples of sound symbolism, and investigated the acoustic features of Japanese and foreign God’s name. We used CNN (Convolution Neural Network) and Grad-CAM for the investigation, and analysed the features based on the classification results.