Sound Symbolism in Speakers of English: A Qualitative Synthesis

The present article contains a systematic synthesis of behavioral studies of sound symbolism—associations of speech sounds and their features with certain semantic or perceptual features—among speakers of English. We first offer a cut-through view of the concepts and ideas relevant to the study of sound symbolism, including empirical approaches and proposed explanations of this phenomenon, and the association mechanisms that it might involve. In light of these theoretical considerations, we present the associations between phoneme features and semantic dimensions, such as size, shape, etc., identified in the systematically compiled behavioral experiments. We pay attention to the most consistent associations and attempt to derive more general tendencies while also considering the magnitude of the effects and noting the limitations of the approach. At the end of the article, a hypothetical explanation of such association patterns is proposed, stipulating that they align along the perceived complexity of the sound wave, measured in terms of its entropy.