How Abstract is Sound Symbolism?Labiality and Diaper Names in Japanese

Abstract

Most baby diaper names sold in Japan contain at least one [p] or [m] (e.g., /meriizu/; /muunii/; /panpaasu/; /mamiipoko/). Building on this observation, this paper explores the hypothesis that labial consonants in general are associated with the images of babies in Japanese, as labial consonants frequently occur in babbling. To this end, the current paper reports two experiments which examined the abstractness and productivity of this labial-baby sound symbolic association. Experiment I was a forced-choice task using nonce words, which shows that all of the labial consonants in Japanese—[p, b, m, ɸ, w]—are associated with the images of baby diapers, despite the fact that the labial consonants that actually occur in the diaper names are only [p] and [m]. Experiment II was an elicitation task, which asked native speakers of Japanese to come up with new baby diaper names and cosmetics names for adults. The results show that all of the labial consonants appear in the baby diaper names more frequently than in the adult cosmetics names. Taken together, the current experiments demonstrate that Japanese speakers associate the phonological feature [labial] with the images of babies, implying that the sound symbolic association at issue may operate at the distinctive feature level rather than at the segmental level.