The audiovisual structure of onomatopoeias: An intrusion of real-world physics in lexical creation

Sound-symbolic word classes are found in different cultures and languages worldwide. These words are continuously produced to code complex information about events. Here we explore the capacity of creative language to transport complex multisensory information in a controlled experiment, where our p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	PloS one Vol. 13; no. 3; p. e0193466
Main Authors:	Taitz, Alan, Assaneo, M Florencia, Elisei, Natalia, Trípodi, Mónica, Cohen, Laurent, Sitt, Jacobo D, Trevisan, Marcos A
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States Public Library of Science 21-03-2018 Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects:	Acoustic phonetics Auditory stimuli Biology and Life Sciences Cognition & reasoning Cognitive linguistics Complexity Computer and Information Sciences Form classes Intrusion Language Learning algorithms Life Sciences Linguistics Machine learning Manner of articulation Medicine and Health Sciences Onomatopoeia Phonetics Physical Sciences Physics Psycholinguistics Psychological research Sensory integration Social Sciences Sound Tongue Visual stimuli Vocal tract Vowels New York Argentina France United States > US
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Summary:	Sound-symbolic word classes are found in different cultures and languages worldwide. These words are continuously produced to code complex information about events. Here we explore the capacity of creative language to transport complex multisensory information in a controlled experiment, where our participants improvised onomatopoeias from noisy moving objects in audio, visual and audiovisual formats. We found that consonants communicate movement types (slide, hit or ring) mainly through the manner of articulation in the vocal tract. Vowels communicate shapes in visual stimuli (spiky or rounded) and sound frequencies in auditory stimuli through the configuration of the lips and tongue. A machine learning model was trained to classify movement types and used to validate generalizations of our results across formats. We implemented the classifier with a list of cross-linguistic onomatopoeias simple actions were correctly classified, while different aspects were selected to build onomatopoeias of complex actions. These results show how the different aspects of complex sensory information are coded and how they interact in the creation of novel onomatopoeias.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. These authors also contributed equally to this work.
ISSN:	1932-6203 1932-6203
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pone.0193466