Associations Between Shape Iconicity Ratings and Speech Acoustics: Comparing Real Words and Pseudowords

Abstract

Iconicity in spoken language refers to the mapping of speech sounds to meaning. For example, the pseudoword "bouba" is judged to sound rounded, whereas the pseudoword "kiki" is judged to sound pointed (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). Recent work has found systematic relationships between speech acoustics and iconicity ratings in various meaning domains, including shape. To control for confounding by semantic knowledge, much research on iconicity relies on pseudowords. However, the role of iconicity in conveying the meanings of real words is still poorly understood. Here, we compared the relationship between speech acoustics and shape iconicity ratings for both pseudowords and real words. In this experiment, participants rated real words and pseudowords for how rounded or pointed they sounded. We compared the relationship between 12 acoustic parameters and the rounded/pointed ratings for both words and pseudowords. We found that the correlations between these acoustic parameters and the ratings were similar for real words and pseudowords, providing key evidence that iconicity of real words is linked to speech acoustics.