Sound symbolism between the readership of the comic book magazines and the names of the main characters

Abstract

The phenomenon in which a sound evokes a particular image is referred to as sound symbolism. While numerous studies on sound symbolism have been reported, many aspects of the phenomenon remain unexplained. Our ultimate goal is to elucidate the full picture of sound symbolism. To that end, we aim to uncover its underlying principles through a bottom-up analysis of various real-world examples. In this study, we focused on the names of main characters appearing in two comic book magazines that target different age demographics, selecting them as a case study in which sound symbolism is presumed to be involved. This approach was based on the hypothesis that readers’ age-related impressions influence the phonological structure of the names of the main characters. In the experiment, we performed binary classification of the names of the main characters into two categories: Monthly CoroCoro Comic and Weekly Shonen Jump. The classifier was built using a convolutional neural network (CNN), and feature analysis was conducted using Grad-CAM, a method from the family of explainable AI (XAI) techniques. Based on the experimental results, we hypothesized that the presence of the mora /N/ evokes a CoroCoro-like image. This hypothesis was subsequently validated through a subjective evaluation experiment and statistical testing, both of which supported the hypothesis.