Sound-Action Symbolism

Recent evidence has shown linkages between actions and segmental elements of speech. For instance, close-front vowels are sound symbolically associated with the precision grip, and front vowels are associated with forward-directed limb movements. The current review article presents a variety of such sound-action effects and proposes that they compose a category of sound symbolism that is based on grounding a conceptual knowledge of a referent in articulatory and manual action representations. In addition, the article proposes that even some widely known sound symbolism phenomena such as the sound-magnitude symbolism can be partially based on similar sensorimotor grounding. It is also discussed that meaning of suprasegmental speech elements in many instances is similarly grounded in body actions. Sound symbolism, prosody, and body gestures might originate from the same embodied mechanisms that enable a vivid and iconic expression of a meaning of a referent to the recipient.Peer reviewe

Interaction between grasping and articulation : How vowel and consonant pronunciation influences precision and power grip responses

Grasping and mouth movements have been proposed to be integrated anatomically, functionally and evolutionarily. In line with this, we have shown that there is a systematic interaction between particular speech units and grip performance. For example, when the task requires pronouncing a speech unit simultaneously with grasp response, the speech units [i] and [t] are associated with relatively rapid and accurate precision grip responses, while [ɑ] and [k] are associated with power grip responses. This study is aimed at complementing the picture about which vowels and consonants are associated with these grasp types. The study validated our view that the high-front vowels and the alveolar consonants are associated with precision grip responses, while low and high-back vowels as well as velar consonants or those whose articulation involves the lowering of the tongue body are associated with power grip responses. This paper also proposes that one reason why small/large concepts are associated with specific speech sounds in the sound-magnitude symbolism is because articulation of these sounds is programmed within the overlapping mechanisms of precision or power grasping.Peer reviewe

Tonal features, intensity, and word order in the perception of prominence

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Connecting directional limb movements to vowel fronting and backing

It has been shown recently that when participants are required to pronounce a vowel at the same time with the hand movement, the vocal and manual responses are facilitated when a front vowel is produced with forward-directed hand movements and a back vowel is produced with backward-directed hand movements. This finding suggests a coupling between spatial programing of articulatory tongue movements and hand movements. The present study revealed that the same effect can be also observed in relation to directional leg movements. The study suggests that the effect operates within the common directional processes of movement planning including at least tongue, hand and leg movements, and these processes might contribute sound-to-meaning mappings to the semantic concepts of 'forward' and 'backward'.Peer reviewe

Interaction in planning vocalizations and grasping

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Mismatch negativity (MMN) to speech sounds is modulated systematically by manual grip execution

Manual actions and speech are connected: for example, grip execution can influence simultaneous vocalizations and vice versa. Our previous studies show that the consonant [k] is associated with the power grip and the consonant [t] with the precision grip. Here we studied whether the interaction between speech sounds and grips could operate already at a pre-attentive stage of auditory processing, reflected by the mismatch-negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potential (ERP). Participants executed power and precision grips according to visual cues while listening to syllable sequences consisting of [ke] and [te] utterances. The grips modulated the MMN amplitudes to these syllables in a systematic manner so that when the deviant was [ke], the MMN response was larger with a precision grip than with a power grip. There was a converse trend when the deviant was [te]. These results suggest that manual gestures and speech can interact already at a pre-attentive processing level of auditory perception, and show, for the first time that manual actions can systematically modulate the MMN. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe