ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2021
Sound symbolism shapes the English language: The maluma/takete effect in English nouns.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- The shape of a kiki: Sound symbolism affects production of figures.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- 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
- Four Trials Is Not Enough: The Amount of Prior Audio-Visual Exposure Determines the Strength of Audio-Tactile Crossmodal Correspondence Early in Development.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Sounds of the future and past.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Iconicity Emerges From Language Experience: Evidence From Japanese Ideophones and Their English Equivalents.Cognitive science · 2024Article
- A psycholinguistic study of intergroup bias and its cultural propagation.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Using artificial intelligence to explore sound symbolic expressions of gender in American English.PeerJ. Computer science · 2024Article
- Sound symbolism in Japanese names: Machine learning approaches to gender classification.PloS one · 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
- Multisensory and lexical information in speech perception.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- The maluma/takete effect is late: No longitudinal evidence for shape sound symbolism in the first year.PloS one · 2023Article
- A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- 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
- Neural Basis of the Sound-Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondence Between Auditory Pseudowords and Visual Shapes.Multisensory research · 2021Article
- Vowel Length Expands Perceptual and Emotional Evaluations in Written Japanese Sound-Symbolic Words.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Implications of the "Language as Situated" View for Written Iconicity.Journal of cognition · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Sound symbolism refers to associations between language sounds (i.e., phonemes) and perceptual and/or semantic features. One example is the maluma/takete effect: an association between certain phonemes (e.g., /m/, /u/) and roundness, and others (e.g., /k/, /ɪ/) and spikiness. While this association has been demonstrated in laboratory tasks with nonword stimuli, its presence in existing spoken language is unknown. Here we examined whether the maluma/takete effect is attested in English, across a broad sample of words. Best-worst judgments from 171 university students were used to quantify the shape of 1,757 objects, from spiky to round. We then examined whether the presence of certain phonemes in words predicted the shape of the objects to which they refer. We found evidence that phonemes associated with roundness are more common in words referring to round objects, and phonemes associated with spikiness are more common in words referring to spiky objects. This represents an instance of iconicity, and thus nonarbitrariness, in human language.
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