ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2018
Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 61 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
61 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- The Falling Tone That Rolls Down the Hill and Gets Slumped: Vertical Mapping of Lexical Tones with Motion and Valence.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Relationships Between Subjective Iconicity Ratings and Phonological Variables in English and Spanish.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 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
- When the meaningless make sense: Wordlikeness and affective norms for 4,800 pseudowords and 1,200 Spanish words.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Reverse engineering what makes a symbol memorable.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The shape of a kiki: Sound symbolism affects production of figures.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- The unity of sense and mind: A review of cross-domain mapping.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Developing Associations to the Sounds of a Name.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Acoustic parameter combinations underlying mapping of pseudoword sounds to multiple domains of meaning: Representational similarity analyses and machine-learning models.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025Article
- Size Sound Symbolism Modulates Linguistic Processing: An ERP Study.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Name-face congruence: Mechanisms and influences on social perception.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Sorries seem to have the harder words.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Crossmodal Pitch-Luminance Association in Tortoises.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Community Size and Iconicity in Sign Languages.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Cracking arbitrariness: A data-driven study of auditory iconicity in spoken English.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Sounds of the future and past.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Formant analysis of vertebrate vocalizations: achievements, pitfalls, and promises.BMC biology · 2025Review
- Names with /i/ Suit Positive Faces: The Naming Paradigm.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Article
1 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (e.g., objects of a certain size or shape). Some of the best-known examples include the mil/mal effect (Sapir, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239, 1929) and the maluma/takete effect (Köhler, 1929). Interest in this topic has been on the rise within psychology, and studies have demonstrated that sound symbolic effects are relevant for many facets of cognition, including language, action, memory, and categorization. Sound symbolism also provides a mechanism by which words' forms can have nonarbitrary, iconic relationships with their meanings. Although various proposals have been put forth for how phonetic features (both acoustic and articulatory) come to be associated with stimuli, there is as yet no generally agreed-upon explanation. We review five proposals: statistical co-occurrence between phonetic features and associated stimuli in the environment, a shared property among phonetic features and stimuli; neural factors; species-general, evolved associations; and patterns extracted from language. We identify a number of outstanding questions that need to be addressed on this topic and suggest next steps for the field.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.