ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2025
Cracking arbitrariness: A data-driven study of auditory iconicity in spoken English.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Iconicity as an organizing principle of the lexicon.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Auditory iconic words display a phonological profile that imitates their referents' sounds. Traditionally, those words are thought to constitute a minor portion of the auditory lexicon. In this article, we challenge this assumption by assessing the pervasiveness of onomatopoeia in the English auditory vocabulary through a novel data-driven procedure. We embed spoken words and natural sounds into a shared auditory space through (a) a short-time Fourier transform, (b) a convolutional neural network trained to classify sounds, and (c) a network trained on speech recognition. Then, we employ the obtained vector representations to measure their objective auditory resemblance. These similarity indexes show that imitation is not limited to some circumscribed semantic categories, but instead can be considered as a widespread mechanism underlying the structure of the English auditory vocabulary. We finally empirically validate our similarity indexes as measures of iconicity against human judgments.
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