ArticleScientific reports2021
Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Comparing semantic and phonetic similarities between Turkish and Japanese onomatopoeia.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Self-reported expressibility predicts communicative success: Open dataset, validation, and simulation.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Exploring the Guessing-Game Experimental Paradigm: Inferences From Closed- Versus Open-Ended Semantic Space.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Auditory Emotional Prosody Perception Using Pseudo-Speech Stimuli in Native and Non-Native Listeners.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Universal interpretations of vocal music.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Deep learning reveals what vocal bursts express in different cultures.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Article
- Gesture is the primary modality for language creation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Vocal communication across cultures: theoretical and methodological issues.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- ThePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- What's in a JapaneseFrontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- A Systematic Investigation of Gesture Kinematics in Evolving Manual Languages in the Lab.Cognitive science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
22 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizations could have played a similar role. We report the first extensive cross-cultural study investigating whether people from diverse linguistic backgrounds can understand novel vocalizations for a range of meanings. In two comprehension experiments, we tested whether vocalizations produced by English speakers could be understood by listeners from 28 languages from 12 language families. Listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested. Our findings challenge the often-cited idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation, demonstrating that in the absence of words people can use vocalizations to communicate a variety of meanings.
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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.