ArticleScientific reports2020
Action sound-shape congruencies explain sound symbolism.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 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
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Falling Tone That Rolls Down the Hill and Gets Slumped: Vertical Mapping of Lexical Tones with Motion and Valence.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Sound-action symbolism in relation to precision manipulation and whole-hand grasp usage.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2024Article
- Neural basis of sound-symbolic pseudoword-shape correspondences.Neuropsychologia · 2023Article
- Neural Basis Of Sound-Symbolic Pseudoword-Shape Correspondences.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Resolving the bouba-kiki effect enigma by rooting iconic sound symbolism in physical properties of round and spiky objects.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Bo-NO-bouba-kiki: picture-word mapping but no spontaneous sound symbolic speech-shape mapping in a language trained bonobo.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- ThePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Interaction between grasping and articulation: How vowel and consonant pronunciation influences precision and power grip responses.PloS one · 2022Article
- Visual and Proprioceptive Perceptions Evoke Motion-Sound Symbolism: Different Acceleration Profiles Are Associated With Different Types of Consonants.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sound symbolism, the surprising semantic relationship between meaningless pseudowords (e.g., 'maluma', 'takete') and abstract (round vs. sharp) shapes, is a hitherto unexplained human-specific knowledge domain. Here we explore whether abstract sound symbolic links can be explained by those between the sounds and shapes of bodily actions. To this end, we asked human subjects to match pseudowords with abstract shapes and, in a different experimental block, the sounds of actions with the shapes of the trajectories of the actions causing these same sounds. Crucially, both conditions were also crossed. Our findings reveal concordant matching in the sound symbolic and action domains, and, importantly, significant correlations between them. We conclude that the sound symbolic knowledge interlinking speech sounds and abstract shapes is explained by audiovisual information immanent to action experience along with acoustic similarities between speech and action sounds. These results demonstrate a fundamental role of action knowledge for abstract sound symbolism, which may have been key to human symbol-manipulation ability.
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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.