ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 100 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
100 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Rethinking the frequency code: a meta-analytic review of the role of acoustic body size in communicative phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Pooled it
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- Sources of Intelligibility of Distant Languages: An Empirical Study.Language and speech · 2026Article
- U.S. English-Speaking Children and Adults Exhibit a "Gleam-Glum" Sound Symbolic Effect Linking Phonemic Vowel Sounds With Emotional Valence.Cognitive science · 2026Article
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- Size Sound Symbolism Modulates Linguistic Processing: An ERP Study.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Sorries seem to have the harder words.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Self-reference promotes vocabulary learning in a foreign language.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- What Makes Iconic Pitch Associations "Natural": The Effect of Age on Affective Meanings of Uptalk and Creak.Language and speech · 2025Article
- Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Subjective Confidence as a Monitor of the Replicability of the Response.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Cracking arbitrariness: A data-driven study of auditory iconicity in spoken English.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Community Size and Iconicity in Sign Languages.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Sounds of the future and past.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Iconicity as an organizing principle of the lexicon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
40 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is widely assumed that one of the fundamental properties of spoken language is the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning. Some exceptions in the form of nonarbitrary associations have been documented in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, but these studies only involved small subsets of the 6,000+ languages spoken in the world today. By analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world's languages, we demonstrate that a considerable proportion of 100 basic vocabulary items carry strong associations with specific kinds of human speech sounds, occurring persistently across continents and linguistic lineages (linguistic families or isolates). Prominently among these relations, we find property words ("small" and i, "full" and p or b) and body part terms ("tongue" and l, "nose" and n). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species' unique communication system.
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