Looking for the bouba-kiki effect in prelexical infants

Abstract Adults and toddlers systematically associate certain pseudowords, such as 'bouba' and 'kiki', with round and spiky shapes, respectively. The ontological origin of this so-called bouba-kiki effect is unknown: it could be an unlearned aspect of perception, appear with language exposure, or only emerge with the ability to produce speech sounds (i.e., babbling). We report the results of three experiments with five-and six-month-olds that found no bouba-kiki effect at all. We discuss the consequences of these findings for the emergence of cross-modal associations in infant speech perception

The Development of Spontaneous Sound-Shape Matching in Monolingual and Bilingual Infants During the First Year

Online First November 17, 2016Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000237.suppRecently it has been proposed that sensitivity to nonarbitrary relationships between speech sounds and objects potentially bootstraps lexical acquisition. However, it is currently unclear whether preverbal infants (e.g., before 6 months of age) with different linguistic profiles are sensitive to such nonarbitrary relationships. Here, the authors assessed 4- and 12-month-old Basque monolingual and Spanish-Basque bilingual infants’ sensitivity to cross-modal correspondences between sound symbolic nonwords without syllable repetition (buba, kike) and drawings of rounded and angular shapes. The findings demonstrate that sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences emerge by 12 months of age in both monolinguals and bilinguals. This finding suggests that spontaneous sound-shape matching is likely to be the product of language learning and development and may not be readily available prior to the onset of word learning

Sensus Communis: Some Perspectives on the Origins of Non-synchronous Cross-Sensory Associations

Adults readily make associations between stimuli perceived consecutively through different sense modalities, such as shapes and sounds. Researchers have only recently begun to investigate such correspondences in infants but only a handful of studies have focused on infants less than a year old. Are infants able to make cross-sensory correspondences from birth? Do certain correspondences require extensive real-world experience? Some studies have shown that newborns are able to match stimuli perceived in different sense modalities. Yet, the origins and mechanisms underlying these abilities are unclear. The present paper explores these questions and reviews some hypotheses on the emergence and early development of cross-sensory associations and their possible links with language development. Indeed, if infants can perceive cross-sensory correspondences between events that share certain features but are not strictly contingent or co-located, one may posit that they are using a “sixth sense” in Aristotle’s sense of the term. And a likely candidate for explaining this mechanism, as Aristotle suggested, is movement

Sound symbolism facilitates long-term retention of the semantic representation of novel verbs in three-year-olds

Previous research has shown that sound symbolism facilitates action label learning when the test trial used to assess learning immediately followed the training trial in which the (novel) verb was taught. The current study investigated whether sound symbolism benefits verb learning in the long term. Forty-nine children were taught either sound-symbolically matching or mismatching pairs made up of a novel verb and an action video. The following day, the children were asked whether a verb can be used for a scene shown in a video. They were tested with four videos for each word they had been taught. The four videos differed as to whether they contained the same or different actions and actors as in the training video: (1) same-action, same-actor; (2) same-action, different-actor; (3) different-action, same-actor; and (4) different-action, different-actor. The results showed that sound symbolism significantly improved the childrens’ ability to encode the semantic representation of the novel verb and correctly generalise it to a new event the following day. A control experiment ruled out the possibility that children were generalising to the “same-action, different-actor” video because they did not recognize the actor change due to the memory decay. Nineteen children were presented with the stimulus videos that had also been shown to children in the sound symbolic match condition in Experiment 1, but this time the videos were not labeled. In the test session the following day, the experimenter tested the children’s recognition memory for the videos. The results indicated that the children could detect the actor change from the original training video a day later. The results of the main experiment and the control experiment support the idea that a motivated (iconic) link between form and meaning facilitates the symbolic development in children. The current study, along with recent related studies, provided further evidence for an iconic advantage in symbol development in the domain of verb learning. A motivated form-meaning relationship can help children learn new words and store them long term in the mental lexicon

DANDO NOMES: O EFEITO BOUBA-KIKI EM EXPERIMENTO DE NOMEAÇÃO LIVRE

Este artigo investiga se o efeito bouba-kiki (Ramachandran e Hubbard, 2001), uma associação multimodal entre sons e formas, pode ser identificado no comportamento de falantes nativos do Português Brasileiro (PB) durante a nomeação livre de pares de figuras. Para isso, realizamos um experimento de produção escrita com falantes de PB. Analisamos os dados estatisticamente por meio de modelos lineares mistos e identificamos que os segmentos /p/, /t/ e /i/ tiveram maior chance de serem usados para nomeação de formas pontudas e os segmentos /l/, /o/ e /u/ para formas redondas. Em seguida, mapeamos se há preferências quanto aos parâmetros sonoros para nomear as diferentes formas. Obstruintes desvozeadas foram mais comuns em nomes de formas pontudas, enquanto soantes foram mais empregadas para nomear formas redondas

Musica delle differenze e delle ricchezze Riflessioni pedagogiche sull’inclusione delle persone con Bisogni Educativi Speciali

This article aims to map out how the sound-musical language, so rooted in the human phylogeny and ontogeny, can change the point of view of the educational-instructional school privileging the experiences of embodied cognition (Gallese, 2009) in place of the much reassuring as discriminatory access roads to knowledge of logical-rational type to achieve the same learning objectives. In a classroom environment in which differences in cognitivestyles and attitudes are the norm and there are increasing cases of special educational needs (Ianes, 2005), is inclusive by training experiences of creative approach to knowledge, grasps the expressive values, and it turns out, empirically, the combinatorial mechanisms, constructive logic, potential development. To achieve this turnaround must: teach music in an open to improvisation forms and teaching composition, impart a cross-disciplinaryrole to the language of the sound bodies and heighten sensitivity to the musicality of their own behavior (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009) in the processes of didactic transposition (Chevallard, 1985). Below are some specific examples of application specific learning disabilities, emphasizing the contribution of neuroscience to the strengthening of the possible implicit links between learning music and read-write (Pavel, 2009).Il contributo intende proporre spunti di riflessione su come il linguaggio sonoro-musicale, così radicato nella filogenesi e ontogenesi umana, possa cambiare il punto di vista educativo-didattico della scuola privilegiando le esperienze di embodied cognition (Gallese, 2009) in luogo delle tanto rassicuranti quanto discriminatorie strade di accesso al sapere di tipo logico-razionalistico per raggiungere identici obiettivi di apprendimento. In un contesto classe nel quale le differenze in termini di stili cognitivi e di attitudini rappresentano la norma e si moltiplicano i casi di bisogni educativi speciali (Ianes, 2005), risulta inclusivauna didattica che promuove esperienze di approccio creativo alla conoscenza, ne coglie i valori espressivi e ne scopre, per via empirica, i meccanismi combinatori, le logiche costruttive, i potenziali di sviluppo. Per realizzare questa inversione di rotta occorre: insegnare musica in modo aperto alle forme dell’improvvisazione e della composizione didattica, conferire un ruolo transdisciplinare al linguaggio dei corpi sonori e acuire la sensibilitàalla musicalità dei propri comportamenti (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009) nei processi di trasposizione didattica (Chevallard, 1985). Si riportano alcuni esempi specifici applicativi su disturbi specifici dell’apprendimento, sottolineando il contributo delle neuroscienze al rafforzamento dei possibili legami impliciti tra apprendimento musicale e letto-scrittura (Pavel, 2009)

Sound symbolic congruency detection in humans but not in great apes

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy through EXC 2025/1 “Matters of Activity (MoA)” and by the “The Sound of Meaning (SOM)”, Pu 97/22-1,“Brain Signatures of Communication (BraSiCo)”, Pu 97/23-1, and “Phonological Networks (PhoNet)”, Pu 97/25-1. K.M. was supported by the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and by the Onassis foundation. M.A was supported by the “SOMICS” ERC Synergy grant (nr.609819). M.B was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 749229.Theories on the evolution of language highlight iconicity as one of the unique features of human language. One important manifestation of iconicity is sound symbolism, the intrinsic relationship between meaningless speech sounds and visual shapes, as exemplified by the famous correspondences between the pseudowords ‘maluma’ vs. ‘takete’ and abstract curved and angular shapes. Although sound symbolism has been studied extensively in humans including young children and infants, it has never been investigated in non-human primates lacking language. In the present study, we administered the classic “takete-maluma” paradigm in both humans (N = 24 and N = 31) and great apes (N = 8). In a forced choice matching task, humans but not great apes, showed crossmodal sound symbolic congruency effects, whereby effects were more pronounced for shape selections following round-sounding primes than following edgy-sounding primes. These results suggest that the ability to detect sound symbolic correspondences is the outcome of a phylogenetic process, whose underlying emerging mechanism may be relevant to symbolic ability more generally.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

A perceptual advantage for onomatopoeia in early word learning: Evidence from eye-tracking

A perceptual advantage for iconic forms in infant language learning has been widely reported in the literature, termed the “sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis” by Imai and Kita (2014). However, empirical research in this area is limited mainly to sound symbolic forms, which are very common in languages such as Japanese but less so in Indo-European languages such as English. In this study, we extended this body of research to onomatopoeia—words that are thought to be present across most of the world’s languages and that are known to be dominant in infants’ early lexicons. In a picture-mapping task, 10- and 11-month-old infants showed a processing advantage for onomatopoeia (e.g., woof woof) over their conventional counterparts (e.g., doggie). However, further analysis suggests that the input may play a key role in infants’ experience and processing of these forms

The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture

'What does the cow say?' An exploratory analysis of onomatopoeia in early phonological development

This thesis presents an in-depth analysis of infants’ acquisition of onomatopoeia – an area of phonological development that until now has been largely overlooked. Infants produce many onomatopoeia in their earliest words, which are often disregarded in phonological analyses owing to their marginal status in adult languages. It is often suggested that onomatopoeia may be easier for infants to learn because of the iconicity that is present in these forms; this corresponds to Imai and Kita’s (2014) ‘sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis’, as well as Werner and Kaplan’s theoretical work Symbol Formation (1963). However, neither of these accounts considers the role of phonological development in infants’ acquisition of onomatopoeia. This thesis presents a series of six studies with a range of perspectives on our central research question: is there a role for onomatopoeia in phonological development? Two analyses of longitudinal diary data address the nature of onomatopoeia in early production, while two eye-tracking studies consider the nature of iconicity in onomatopoeia and whether or not this has a perceptual advantage in early development. The role of the caregiver is then considered, with a prosodic analysis of onomatopoeia in infant-directed speech and a longitudinal perspective of the role of onomatopoeia in infant-caregiver interactions. The contributions from thesis are threefold. First, we offer empirical evidence towards an understanding of how onomatopoeia fit within an infant’s wider phonological development, by showing how onomatopoeia facilitate early perception, production and interactions. Second, our results illustrate how these forms are an important aspect of phonological development and should not be overlooked in infant language research, as has often been the case in the development literature. Finally, these findings expand the iconicity research by showing that onomatopoeia do not present an iconic advantage in language learning, as has so often been assumed by theorists in the field