ArticleScientific reports2022
Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Comparing semantic and phonetic similarities between Turkish and Japanese onomatopoeia.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Relationships Between Subjective Iconicity Ratings and Phonological Variables in English and Spanish.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- Sources of Intelligibility of Distant Languages: An Empirical Study.Language and speech · 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
- 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
- Learned use of an innate sound-meaning association in birds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Adults interpret iconicity in speech and gesture via the same modality-independent process.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Iconic Words Are Associated With Iconic Gestures.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Acoustic estimation of voice roughness.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Sounds of the future and past.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Reply to: Not just the alveolar trill, but all "r-like" sounds are associated with roughness across languages, pointing to a more general link between sound and touch.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Not just the alveolar trill, but all "r-like" sounds are associated with roughness across languages, pointing to a more general link between sound and touch.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Iconicity Emerges From Language Experience: Evidence From Japanese Ideophones and Their English Equivalents.Cognitive science · 2024Article
- Sound-meaning associations allow listeners to infer the meaning of foreign language words.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- Do Great Apes Use Iconic Gestures?Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive scienceReview
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Cross-modal integration between sound and texture is important to perception and action. Here we show this has repercussions for the structure of spoken languages. We present a new statistical universal linking speech with the evolutionarily ancient sense of touch. Words that express roughness-the primary perceptual dimension of texture-are highly likely to feature a trilled /r/, the most commonly occurring rhotic consonant. In four studies, we show the pattern to be extremely robust, being the first widespread pattern of iconicity documented not just across a large, diverse sample of the world's spoken languages, but also across numerous sensory words within languages. Our deep analysis of Indo-European languages and Proto-Indo-European roots indicates remarkable historical stability of the pattern, which appears to date back at least 6000 years.
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