Frontiers | Japanese Sound-Symbolic Words for Representing the Hardness of an Object Are Judged Similarly by Japanese and English Speakers
Contrary to the assumption of modern linguistics, sound symbolism, which is the non-arbitrary relationship between sounds and meanings, exists. Sound symbolism, including the “Bouba–Kiki” effect, implies the universality of such relationships; individuals from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds can similarly relate sound-symbolic words to referents, although the extent of these similarities remains to be fully understood. Here, we examined if subjects from different countries could similarly infer the surface texture properties from words that sound-symbolically represent hard...
Source: frontiersin.org
