| 1. |
- Anikin, Andrey, et al.
(författare)
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Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?
- 2023
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 1091-6490. ; 120:17
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within ±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features—the presence of specific phonemic classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener’s first language—were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic preferences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker’s voice quality, and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly.
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| 2. |
- Carling, Gerd, et al.
(författare)
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A study in de-iconization : phonological and morphological adaptations of Indo-European bird names
- 2022
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Ingår i: ; , s. 38-38
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Bird names are very important and interesting when it comes to studying iconicity. In particular, words naming birds with a distinct call, such as crow, raven, cuckoo, owl, and eagle, typically emerge by direct imitation. Initially, the name of the bird in languages mimic the sound of the bird’s call (Marttila 2011). However, over time, the sound structure of the name of the bird often becomes subdued to phonological change, leading to an interesting dichotomy: previous iconic forms of the bird’s name may exist in a language parallel to a renewed form, more similar to the bird’s call. This is an interesting example of de-iconization (Flaksman 2017), which has interested linguists for a long time (Carling and Johansson 2014; Jespersen 1922). Another aspect of the de-iconization is the morphological adaptation of the lexemes: the more they de-iconize, the more they become adapted to the morphological system of the language. We will look more carefully at bird names for crow, raven, cuckoo, owl, goose, and eagle in several Indo-European branches, including Germanic, Italic, Indo-Aryan, and Tocharian, compiling a dataset of (IPA-coded) sound structures, sound changes and morphological adaptations, demonstrating how these birds’ names in languages may follow or deviate from phonological conditions synchronically and in the prehistory of the branches. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that iconicity has a capacity, with certain meanings, to alter the regular conditions for sound change. Besides dealing with the theoretical preconditions for iconicity in relation to regular sound change, we will measure how the different forms variate phonologically and morphologically with respect to the different birds.Carling, Gerd and Johansson, Niklas (2014), 'Motivated language change: processes involved in the growth and conventionalization of onomatopoeia and sound symbolism', Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 46 (2), 199-217.Flaksman, Maria (2017), 'Iconic treadmill hypothesis', in Matthias Bauer Angelika Zirker, Olga Fischer, Christina Ljungberg (ed.), Dimensions of Iconicity. Iconicity in Language and Literature 15 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), 15-38.Jespersen, Otto (1922), Language: its nature, development and origin (London: Allen & Unwin).Marttila, Annu (2011), A cross-linguistic study of lexical iconicity and its manifestation in bird names (Muenchen: LINCOM Europa).
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| 3. |
- Carling, Gerd, et al.
(författare)
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Cultural connotations of categorizing the environment : does the presence of a linguistic gender and noun class system in any way connect to cultural feature data?
- 2021
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Ingår i: ; , s. 1-1
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Social studies indicate that a gendered language may limit equal opportunities for women (Jakiela and Ozier 2018). Likewise, the use of gender-neutral pronouns may improve gender equality (Tavits and Pérez 2019). We aim to investigate this issue using cross-cultural data. The studies of (Whyte 1978) and (Sanderson and Donoghue 1989) (W1978/SD1989) connect gender inequality to cultural features.Testing three theories, the Warfare hypothesis, the Marxian hypothesis, and the Non-marxian materialist hypothesis, they found significant effects only for the latter (lower percentage of contribution to food by women, intense agriculture, use of plow, patrilineality, partilocality). Wh1978/SD1989 used a sample of 186 cultures, selected to avoid Galton effects. We use a global set of linguistic gender/noun class (3079 languages), retrieved by automation (Virk et al. 2017) and corrected manually. We extracted the features of Wh1989/SD1989 from D-PLACE (Kirby et al. 2016). We tested (using a mixed model) the inequality features Domestic authority of women, Ritualized female solidarity, and Control of women’s sexuality, against linguistic gender and/or noun class. We found no correlation. We tested the features significantly correlated with gender inequality in W1989/SD1989 and found effects for noun class, which is a Galton effect (most noun classes are found in Africa). When we merged gender/noun class and tested against the significant features, we found several negative and positive correlations, connected to, e.g., participation in agriculture, crosscousin marriage, patrilocal residence, and intense agriculture. Therefore, we suspect that gender/noun class may correlate with subsistence and kinship, to which inequality may be another side-effect.
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| 4. |
- Carling, Gerd
(författare)
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Linguistic archaeology : An introduction and methodological guide
- 2024
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Linguistic Archaeology provides students with an accessible introduction to the field of linguistic archaeology, both as theoretical framework and methodological toolkit, for understanding the conceptual foundations and practical considerations involved in reconstructing the prehistory of language. The book introduces the field's expansion out of traditional approaches to focus more on the interplay of related disciplines and the reconstruction of human language beyond the written period. The opening chapter outlines key theories and charts their development from the nineteenth century through to today, drawing on work from computational historical linguistics, phylogenetics, and linguistic anthropology. Subsequent chapters build on theory to take a hands-on approach in mining empirical data in the process of reconstructing language prehistory, including references, links, and instructions to open access resources, and offering a step-by-step guide for employing the rich range of available methods in working with this data. Closing chapters situate theory and method in context against chronological and geographic perspectives and look ahead to future trajectories for continued progress in this emerging area of study. Offering a holistic entry point into linguistic archaeology, this innovative volume will be a helpful resource for students in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language evolution, and cultural geography.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Dellert, Johannes, et al.
(författare)
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Preferred sound groups of vocal iconicity reflect evolutionary mechanisms of sound stability and first language acquisition : evidence from Eurasia
- 2021
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Ingår i: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. - : The Royal Society. - 1471-2970 .- 0962-8436. ; 376:1824
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and ‘blind’ to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates with iconic occurrence in the global set. Further, we find that sound stability and iconic occurrence of consonants are connected to acquisition order in the first language, indicating that children acquiring language play a role in maintaining vocal iconicity over time.
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| 7. |
- Erben Johansson, Niklas, et al.
(författare)
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Cultural evolution leads to vocal iconicity in an experimental iterated learning task
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Language Evolution. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 2058-4571 .- 2058-458X. ; 6:1, s. 1-25
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Experimental and cross-linguistic studies have shown that vocal iconicity is prevalent in words that carry meanings related to size and shape. Although these studies demonstrate the importance of vocal iconicity and reveal the cognitive biases underpinning it, there is less work demonstrating how these biases lead to the evolution of a sound symbolic lexicon in the first place. In this study, we show how words can be shaped by cognitive biases through cultural evolution. Using a simple experimental setup resembling the game telephone, we examined how a single word form changed as it was passed from one participant to the next by a process of immediate iterated learning. About 1,500 naïve participants were recruited online and divided into five condition groups. The participants in the control-group received no information about the meaning of the word they were about to hear, while the participants in the remaining four groups were informed that the word meant either big or small (with the meaning being presented in text), or round or pointy (with the meaning being presented as a picture). The first participant in a transmission chain was presented with a phonetically diverse word and asked to repeat it. Thereafter, the recording of the repeated word was played for the next participant in the same chain. The sounds of the audio recordings were then transcribed and categorized according to six binary sound parameters. By modelling the proportion of vowels or consonants for each sound parameter, the small-condition showed increases of front unrounded vowels and the pointy-condition increases of acute consonants. The results show that linguistic transmission is sufficient for vocal iconicity to emerge, which demonstrates the role non-arbitrary associations play in the evolution of language.
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| 8. |
- Erben Johansson, Niklas
(författare)
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Prominence effects in vocal iconicity : Implications for lexical access and language change
- 2024
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Ingår i: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. - 0001-4966. ; 155:1, s. 8-17
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper explores how three cognitive and perceptual cues, vocal iconicity, resemblance-based mappings between form and meaning, and segment position and lexical stress, interact to affect word formation and language processing. The study combines an analysis of the word-internal positions that iconic segments occur in based on data from 245 language families with an experimental study in which participants representing more than 30 languages rated iconic and non-iconic pseudowords. The pseudowords were designed to systematically vary segment and stress placement across syllables. The results for study 1 indicate that segments used iconically appear approximately 0.26 segment positions closer toward the beginning of words compared to non-iconic segments. In study 2, it was found that iconic segments occurring in stressed syllables and non-iconic segments occurring in the second syllable were rated as significantly more fitting. These findings suggest that the interplay between vocal iconicity and prominence effects increases the predictive function of iconic segments by foregrounding sounds, which intrinsically carry semantic information. Consequently, these results contribute to the understanding of the widespread occurrence of vocal iconicity in human languages.
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| 9. |
- Erben Johansson, Niklas
(författare)
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The building blocks of sound symbolism
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Languages contain thousands of words each and are made up by a seemingly endless collection of sound combinations. Yet a subsection of these show clear signs of corresponding word shapes for the same meanings which is generally known as vocal iconicity and sound symbolism. This dissertation explores the boundaries of sound symbolism in the lexicon from typological, functional and evolutionary perspectives in an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the role sound symbolism plays in human language. In order to achieve this, the subject in question was triangulated by investigating different methodologies which included lexical data from a large number of language families, experiment participants and robust statistical tests.Study I investigates basic vocabulary items in a large number of language families in order to establish the extent of sound symbolic items in the core of the lexicon, as well as how the sound-meaning associations are mapped and interconnected. This study shows that by expanding the lexical dataset compared to previous studies and completely controlling for genetic bias, a larger number of sound-meaning associations can be established. In addition, by placing focus on the phonetic and semantic features of sounds and meanings, two new types of sounds symbolism could be established, along with 20 semantically and phonetically superordinate concepts which could be linked to the semantic development of the lexicon.Study II explores how sound symbolic associations emerge in arbitrary words through sequential transmission over language users. This study demonstrates that transmission of signals is sufficient for iconic effects to emerge and does not require interactional communication. Furthermore, it also shows that more semantically marked meanings produce stronger effects and that iconicity in the size and shape domains seems to be dictated by similarities between the internal semantic relationships of each oppositional word pair and its respective associated sounds.Studies III and IV use color words to investigate differences and similarities between low-level cross-modal associations and sound symbolism in lexemes. Study III explores the driving factors of cross-modal associations between colors and sounds by experimentally testing implicit preferences between several different acoustic and visual parameters. The most crucial finding was that neither specific hues nor specific vowels produced any notable effects and it is therefore possible that previously reported associations between vowels and colors are actually dependent on underlying visual and acoustic parameters.Study IV investigates sound symbolic associations in words for colors in a large number of language families by correlating acoustically described segments with luminance and saturation values obtained from cross-linguistic color-naming data. In accordance with Study III, this study showed that luminance produced the strongest results and was primarily associated with vowels, while saturation was primarily associated with consonants. This could then be linked to cross-linguistic lexicalization order of color words.To summarize, this dissertation shows the importance of studying the underlying parameters of sound symbolism semantically and phonetically in both language users and cross-linguistic language data. In addition, it also shows the applicability of non-arbitrary sound-meaning associations for gaining a deeper understanding of how linguistic categories have developed evolutionarily and historically.
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| 10. |
- Erben Johansson, Niklas, et al.
(författare)
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Vocal iconicity in nominal classification
- 2022
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Ingår i: Language and Cognition. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 1866-9859 .- 1866-9808. ; , s. 1-26
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- While recent years have seen a substantial increase of studies investigating vocal iconicity in the lexicon of spoken languages, its presence in grammatical structures is poorly understood. This study investigates the presence of vocal iconicity in nominal classification systems by collecting nominal classification devices from the two main system types: 210 non-agreeing languages (126 families) and 151 agreeing languages (123 families). To detect overrepresentations of sound types in class meanings, the nominal classification devices were grouped according to comparable semantic categories, transcribed using comparable phonetic system, and analyzed through Bayesian mixed models. The strongest results were found for associations between nominal classification devices denoting flat and low, front, unrounded vowels, along with several weak associations relating to shape/size/quantity, function, humanness/animacy, and sex. These associations mostly correlate with previous vocal iconicity findings, but crucially, the involved nominal classification devices are mostly semantically typical for non-agreeing, for example, classifier, systems. These findings were attributed to structural differences between nominal classification system types, which result from grammaticalization processes, for example, phonetic erosion and semantic bleaching. Thus, increased formal predictability through grammatical agreement comes at a cost of semantic transparency which, in turn, dismantles the semantic prerequisites needed for vocal iconic associations to be operational.
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