A Verification of Sound-Symbolism Visualization Using Onomatopoeia Thesaurus Map

Abstract

Onomatopoeias can simply describe sounds or state of things. There is a hypothesis that onomatopoeias have a characteristic that is called sound symbolism. Sound symbolism can make people imagine a specific image. According to this, similar specific sound and phoneme can make people imagine similar specific image. Urata et al. hired the sound symbolism and proposed an onomatopoeia thesaurus map, which can visualize semantic relationship among onomatopoeias. The onomatopoeia thesaurus map is constructed on a middle layer of an deep autoencoder. Urata et al. reported that the local positional relation on the map can visualize and indicate semantic relationship among onomatopoeias. But the evaluation about the visualization wasn’t satisfyingly performed. Our study set up a hypothesis based on Japanese linguistic knowledge about the sound symbolism, and experimented to evaluate visualization ability of the map. The most of the experimental result supported the hypothesis, however a part of it didn’t.