The Articulatory Dynamism of Sound Symbolism

Cognition of Spatial Distance in Relation to Articulatory Trajectories

Abstract

Many factors have been studied to account for why and how the phenomenon of sound symbolism occurs. This paper proposes an "articulatory dynamism" model, which may contribute as another, novel factor for the understanding of sound symbolism. The model was constructed based on the idea that the way humans use words in spoken language may somehow be related to the experience of articulatory activities. To verify the model, I conducted a sound-picture matching experiment with native speakers of English. The participants were asked to judge whether a nonsense word stimulus matched a visual stimulus by pressing a key labeled "matching" or "not matching." The word stimuli and visual stimuli either shared the feature of spatial distance, or did not. The overall results showed that the participants tended to give more negative judgements ("not matching") than positive judgements ("matching"). However, when the pairs did not share the concept of distance and articulation distance, they showed a remarkably higher negative judgement rate. This suggests that the way humans visually perceive distance may relate to the way they kinesthetically perceive distance through articulatory movements.