Do Sounds Carry Their Own Meanings? Onomatopoeia and Arbitrariness of the Sign

How much meaning is there just in sounds? How much are words alike across languages? In this week's episode, we talk about the arbitrariness of the sign: how our sounds don't have to connect to the meanings they do, how much cases like onomatopoeia serve as a counter to the random matching of words, and whether individual sounds or syllables carry their own semantic punch.

This is Topic #67!

This week's tag language: Māori!

Related videos:
Following the Signs: How Do We Learn Words? -    • Word Learning  

Last episode:
Desert Island Words: What Questions Can't You Ask? -    • What Questions Can't We Ask? Syntacti...  

Other of our psycholinguistics videos:
Follow My Eyes: What Can Our Eyes Tell Us About Language? -    • What Can Our Eyes Tell Us About Langu...  
Walking the Garden Path: How Do We Interpret Sentences? -    • How Do We Interpret Sentences? Parsin...  
Prime Time: How Are Words Connected in Our Minds? -    • How Are Words Connected in our Minds?...  

Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: thelingspace.tumblr.com/
Twitter: twitter.com/TheLingSpace
Facebook: www.facebook.com/thelingspace/

And at our website, www.thelingspace.com/ !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.storenvy.com/

Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at www.thelingspace.com/episode-67/

We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.

Spanish subtitles by Federico Falletti

Sources:
The initial discussion of the arbitrariness of the sign is from:
de Saussure, F. (1916). Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris, 1983.
There's a good discussion of the concepts on the Wikipedia page regarding the book:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_Linguistic…

If you are interested in cross-linguistic onomatopoeia and also very cute pictures, try:
soundimals.tumblr.com/
chapmangamo.tumblr.com/

The Dutch/Japanese ideophone study:
Lockwood, G., M. Dingemanse, & P. Hagoort (2016). Sound-symbolism boosts novel word learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
(Full paper available at: dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000235)

The initial studies for the sound symbolism / phonesthetics with molmo and ikitik:
Köhler, W (1929). Gestalt Psychology. (We consulted the 1947 second edition.)

These shapes are often known as "kiki" and "bouba", from the following study:
Ramachandran, V. S., and E. M. Hubbard. (2001). Synaesthesia—a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, 3–34.

There's a good and accessible overview of the state of this research in:
Lockwood, G. & M. Dingemanse. (2015). Iconicity in the Lab: A Review of Behavioral, Developmental, and Neuroimaging Research into Sound-Symbolism. Language Sciences, 1246. (full paper to be found at: dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01246)

An interesting article about product names and how they happen: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/famous-names

Looking forward to next week!