A Study on the Sound Symbolism of Popular Words Among Young People

Abstract

The phenomenon where sounds themselves evoke certain images is called sound symbolism. Although numerous studies on sound symbolism have been reported,many aspects remain unexplained. The ultimate goal of our research is to elucidate the overall picture of sound symbolism.To achieve this, we aim to collect various examples and attempt to discover their unique sound symbolism.By integrating the insights gained from many instances of sound symbolism, we hope to clarify the overall picture of sound symbolism.In this study, we adopted new and trendy words listed in the "Heisei" New Words and Buzzwords Dictionary as a case believed to possess sound symbolism.We hypothesized that there might be sound symbolism differences between young people's words and general words among these new and trendy words.In the experiment, we performed binary classification of new and trendy words into "young people's words" and "general words" classes.The classifier was constructed based on CNN, and for feature analysis, we used Grad-CAM, one of the XAI techniques.Based on the results of the classification experiment, we set up a hypothesis regarding the sound symbolism related to the names of new and trendy words and conducted a discussion.