Sound symbolism highlights relative distinctiveness: Evidence from English vocabulary

There is robust evidence that people associate certain sounds with meanings, yet the prevalence and importance of sound symbolism in natural language remains debated. This paper proposes that some failures to detect sound symbolic patterns stem from mischaracterizing how sound symbolism operates. Many studies examine whether words with similar meanings have similar sounds. Yet if words shared sounds with lexical competitors, sound symbolism could hinder processing and not persist. Instead, this paper proposes that sound symbolism highlights features that distinguish referents from their competitors. To test this, the study revisits size sound symbolism in English. Front vowels are associated with small size and back vowels with large size. It has also been suggested that voiceless stops are associated with small size whereas voiced stops with large size. Prior studies found that size adjectives in English are sound symbolic, but the general vocabulary is not. This paper instead analyzes words whose definitions suggest relative size in context-e.g., classifying terrella ("a little Earth") as small, despite its absolute size. Words were extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary if their definitions included a size adjective (e.g., small, large), and retained if language models judged them as referring to objects relatively small or large in context. Results show that words for relatively small referents contain more front over back vowels and more voiceless over voiced stops than words for relatively large referents. These findings suggest that sound symbolism highlights referents' distinctiveness, and that prior conceptual and methodological approaches might have obscured sound symbolic patterns and benefits. This reframing has implications for language evolution, acquisition, and processing, and suggests new directions for future research on iconicity in language.