ArticlePhonetica2018
Sound Symbolic Patterns in Pokémon Names.
Article in Phonetica, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Comparing semantic and phonetic similarities between Turkish and Japanese onomatopoeia.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Rethinking Hominin Air Sac Loss in Light of Phylogenetically Meaningful Evidence.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Article
- Sound symbolism in Japanese names: Machine learning approaches to gender classification.PloS one · 2024Article
- A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Random forests, sound symbolism and Pokémon evolution.PloS one · 2023Article
- What's in a JapaneseFrontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Phonation Types Matter in Sound Symbolism.Cognitive science · 2021Article
- English Speakers Can Infer Pokémon Types Based on Sound Symbolism.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Gotta Name'em All: an Experimental Study on the Sound Symbolism of Pokémon Names in Brazilian Portuguese.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2020Article
- Visual and Proprioceptive Perceptions Evoke Motion-Sound Symbolism: Different Acceleration Profiles Are Associated With Different Types of Consonants.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Cross-linguistically shared and language-specific sound symbolism in novel words elicited by locomotion videos in Japanese and English.PloS one · 2019Article
- Korean Mothers Attune the Frequency and Acoustic Saliency of Sound Symbolic Words to the Linguistic Maturity of Their Children.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This paper presents a case study of sound symbolism, cases in which certain sounds tend to be associated with particular meanings. We used the corpus of all Japanese Pokémon names available as of October 2016. We tested the effects of voiced obstruents, mora counts, and vowel quality on Pokémon characters' size, weight, strength parameters, and evolution levels. We found that the number of voiced obstruents in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and general strength parameters, except for speed. We argue that this result is compatible with the frequency code hypothesis of Ohala. The number of moras in Pokémon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and all strength parameters. Vowel height is also shown to have an influence on size and weight - Pokémon characters with initial high vowels tend to be smaller and lighter, although the effect size is not very large. Not only does this paper offer a new case study of sound symbolism, it provides evidence that sound symbolism is at work when naming proper nouns.
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