I received my PhD in linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. My research focus is devising an approach to explaining imitation in spoken and signed languages. I am interested in ideophones and also sign language phonology. Supervisors: Youngah Do and Stephen Matthews
Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be structurally m... more Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be structurally marked, i.e., exhibiting unique structural properties. In this paper, “marked” is broadly used to mean phonologically marked (Dingemanse, 2021: Akita and Dingemanse, 2019). Using Cantonese ideophones as our case study, this paper measures sequential predictability within ideophones and non-ideophones, as a way to test their relative degree of structural markedness. We created a database of non-ideophones and ideophones from the Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus (HKCC) (Luke and Wong, 2015) and Mok (2001) and calculated the sequential predictability of each phoneme in various phonological contexts. The results indicate that Cantonese ideophones exhibit lower degrees of sequential predictability than non-ideophones, lending empirical support to the structural markedness of ideophones. We argue that non-ideophones exhibit a higher degree of sequential predictability because they follow the phonotactic regularities of Cantonese, whereas ideophones, to some degree, flout these regulations in favor of sequences of sounds that might better depict a given referent or percept.
Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and... more Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants’ are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task—a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly...
Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and... more Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants' are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task-a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective-meaning pairs-indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow-up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives.
Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be structurally m... more Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be structurally marked, i.e., exhibiting unique structural properties. In this paper, "marked" is broadly used to mean phonologically marked (Dingemanse, 2021: Akita and Dingemanse, 2019). Using Cantonese ideophones as our case study, this paper measures sequential predictability within ideophones and non-ideophones, as a way to test their relative degree of structural markedness. We created a database of non-ideophones and ideophones from the Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus (HKCC) (Luke and Wong, 2015) and Mok (2001) and calculated the sequential predictability of each phoneme in various phonological contexts. The results indicate that Cantonese ideophones exhibit lower degrees of sequential predictability than non-ideophones, lending empirical support to the structural markedness of ideophones. We argue that non-ideophones exhibit a higher degree of sequential predictability because they follow the phonotactic regularities of Cantonese, whereas ideophones, to some degree, flout these regulations in favor of sequences of sounds that might better depict a given referent or percept.
This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which c... more This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which collects 4948 unique onomatopoeia and ideophones (mimetics, expressives) of Mandarin, as well as Middle Chinese and Old Chinese. These are analyzed according to a wide range of variables, e.g., description, frequency. Apart from an overview of these variables, we provide a tutorial that shows how the database can be accessed in different formats (.rds, .xlsx, .csv, R package and online app interface), and how the database can be used to explore skewed tonal distribution across Mandarin ideophones. Since CHIDEOD is a data repository, potential future research applications are discussed.
Building on sound symbolism, which Hinton, Nichols & Ohala (1994: 1) define as ‘the direct linkag... more Building on sound symbolism, which Hinton, Nichols & Ohala (1994: 1) define as ‘the direct linkage between sound and meaning’, this paper will explore how some lexical items in Mandarin may be derived from imitatives. Imitatives (擬聲 詞 nǐshēngcí or onomatopoeia) are a category of lexical sound symbolism (Masuda 2002: 6) in which speech is used to mimic the sounds of the world (e.g. meow, vroom-vroom, ding-dong, bam) (Hinton et al. 1994: 3). The process of imitatives departing from their lexical (i.e. these onomatopoeias are well-formed Mandarin syllables and part of the general lexicon to serve an onomatopoeic function) onomatopoeic role and adopting arbitrary semantic functions is what I will call imitative shift. Sinitic has a long recorded history of imitatives shifting from the iconic side of the continuum to the more arbitrary (Li 2007: 151). Van Langendonck (2010: 394) states that “iconicity can be contrasted with ‘arbitrariness,’ or in Pierce’s terms, iconic is the opposite of...
Iconic words are supposed to exhibit imitative relationships between their linguistic forms and t... more Iconic words are supposed to exhibit imitative relationships between their linguistic forms and their referents. Many studies have worked to pinpoint sound-to-meaning correspondences for ideophones from different languages. The correspondence patterns show similarities across languages, but what makes such language-specific correspondences universal, as iconicity claims to be, remains unclear. This could be due to a lack of consensus on how to describe and test the perceptuo-motor affordances that make an iconic word feel imitative to speakers. We created and analysed a database of 1,860 ideophones across 13 languages, and found that seven articulatory features, physiologically accessible to all spoken language users, pattern according to semantic features of ideophones. Our findings pave the way for future research to utilize articulatory properties as a means to test and explain how iconicity is encoded in spoken language. The perspective taken here fits in with ongoing research o...
The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 ... more The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 processing, L2 language processing generally underuses grammatical information, prioritizing nongrammatical information. Specifically, this cross-modal priming study tests SSH at the level of morphology, investigating whether late advanced L2 learners construct hierarchically structured representations for trimorphemic derived words during real-time processing as native speakers do. Our results support SSH. In lexical decision on English trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]), L1 recognition of the targets was facilitated by their bimorphemic morphological-structural constituent primes (e.g., unkind), but not by their bimorphemic nonconstituent primes (e.g., kindness), which were only semantically and formally related to the target. In contrast, L2 recognition was equally facilitated by both constituent and nonconstituent primes. These results suggest that unlike L1 ...
Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as ‘sounding like what they mean,’ so that phono... more Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as ‘sounding like what they mean,’ so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog’s barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl- (Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning ‘light’ via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like ‘How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?’ So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By d...
Supplementary Materials for PhD thesis: Thompson, A. L. (2019). Movement as meaning: an articulat... more Supplementary Materials for PhD thesis: Thompson, A. L. (2019). Movement as meaning: an articulatory investigation into the iconicity of ideophones. (Unpublished doctoral thesis). the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR.
Iconicity is a resemblance between form and meaning grounded in perceptuo-motor analogy. In speec... more Iconicity is a resemblance between form and meaning grounded in perceptuo-motor analogy. In speech, iconicity is understood as words “sounding like what they mean.” Studies on English and Spanish use ratings to identify words speakers consider iconic. Perry et al. (2015) show that English onomatopoeia are rated highest, followed by adjectives/verbs > nouns > function words. Our study replicates this for Japanese but, owing to additional variables, yields more nuanced findings. Word-class aside, Japanese speakers are more likely to rate words as iconic if they are an (1) ideophone > (2) Yamato/native prosaic word > or (3) non-Yamato prosaic word. For comparison, we reanalyzed English ratings from Perry et al. (2015), and found neither strata (Germanic, Latinate, French) nor historically iconic etymology had a significant effect. With these factors in mind, we propose that ratings reflect a word’s relationship to sensory information rather than iconicity.
Some languages have more forms of conventional spoken iconicity than others. Japanese, for exampl... more Some languages have more forms of conventional spoken iconicity than others. Japanese, for example, has more ideophones than English. So how do speakers of a language with limited semantic categories of ideophones depict percepts? One possibility is demonstrations: unconventional, yet depictive, discourse. Demonstrations follow quotatives (e.g., I was like ___) and perform referents as opposed to describing them. In English, a language with arguably restricted sets of ideophones, speakers may enact/create demonstrations using their hands, voice, and body. This paper examines which visual and spoken components are vital to comprehending demonstrations in English with features from Güldemann's (2008) observations: enacted verbal behaviour, non-linguistic vocal imitation, ideophones, and representational gesture. 28 videos containing demonstrations of 11 celebrities engaging in impromptu storytelling on USA talk shows were our critical stimuli. 145 native speakers completed forced multiple-choice judgement tasks to qualify each demonstration. To see which forms of visual and spoken communication contributed to comprehension, videos were presented in visual (muted), audio (pixelated and darkened), and audiovisual (left as is) conditions. Our results show that if arbitrary speech (e.g., I was like I can't go over the ocean!) is in a demonstration, then it is vital to comprehension. The visual condition rendered these demonstrations uninterpretable. If sound imitations (e.g., I was like prfff!) or ideophones coupled with hand gesture (e.g., I was like yay! + hands opening and closing in unison) are in a demonstration, then the interpretability of that demonstration across our experimental conditions depends on whether its components (gesture, sound imitation) can unambiguously express meaning in isolation. These findings allow us to make several conjectures about the wellformedness of demonstrations. Our findings are in line with studies on enactments in deaf signed languages whereby the more unconventional a form of iconic depiction is, the more it requires conventional framing to be interpretable.
This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption t... more This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption that individual morphemes of multimorphemic words are represented according to a hierarchical structure. The results here support the psychological reality behind this assumption: Recognition of trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]) was significantly facilitated by prior processing of their substrings when the substrings served as morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., unkind), but not when the substrings were not morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., kindness). This morphological structural priming occurred independently of the linear positions of morphological constituents.
This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which c... more This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which collects 4948 unique onomatopoeia and ideophones (mimetics, expressives) of Mandarin, as well as Middle Chinese and Old Chinese. These are analyzed according to a wide range of variables, e.g., description, frequency. Apart from an overview of these variables, we provide a tutorial that shows how the database can be accessed in different formats (.rds, .xlsx, .csv, R package and online app interface), and how the database can be used to explore skewed tonal distribution across Mandarin ideophones. Since CHIDEOD is a data repository, potential future research applications are discussed.
Some languages have more forms of conventional spoken iconicity than others. Japanese, for exampl... more Some languages have more forms of conventional spoken iconicity than others. Japanese, for example, has more ideophones than English. So how do speakers of a language with limited semantic categories of ideophones depict percepts? One possibility is demonstrations: unconventional, yet depictive, discourse. Demonstrations follow quotatives (e.g., I was like ___) and perform referents as opposed to describing them. In English, a language with arguably restricted sets of ideophones, speakers may enact/create demonstrations using their hands, voice, and body. This paper examines which visual and spoken components are vital to comprehending demonstrations in English with features from Güldemann's (2008) observations: enacted verbal behaviour, non-linguistic vocal imitation, ideophones, and representational gesture. 28 videos containing demonstrations of 11 celebrities engaging in impromptu storytelling on USA talk shows were our critical stimuli. 145 native speakers completed forced multiple-choice judgement tasks to qualify each demonstration. To see which forms of visual and spoken communication contributed to comprehension, videos were presented in visual (muted), audio (pixelated and darkened), and audiovisual (left as is) conditions. Our results show that if arbitrary speech (e.g., I was like I can't go over the ocean!) is in a demonstration, then it is vital to comprehension. The visual condition rendered these demonstrations uninterpretable. If sound imitations (e.g., I was like prfff!) or ideophones coupled with hand gesture (e.g., I was like yay! + hands opening and closing in unison) are in a demonstration, then the interpretability of that demonstration across our experimental conditions depends on whether its components (gesture, sound imitation) can unambiguously express meaning in isolation. These findings allow us to make several conjectures about the wellformedness of demonstrations. Our findings are in line with studies on enactments in deaf signed languages whereby the more unconventional a form of iconic depiction is, the more it requires conventional framing to be interpretable.
Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as 'sounding like what they mean,' so that phono... more Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as 'sounding like what they mean,' so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog's barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl-(Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning 'light' via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like 'How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?' So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By drawing observations from the visual modality, this paper mediates ambiguity between iconicity and systematicity in spoken language by proposing a methodology which explains how iconicity is achieved through perceptuo-motor analogies derived from oral articulatory gesture. We propose that universal accessibility of articulatory gestures, and human ability to create (perceptuo-motor) analogy, is what in turn makes iconicity universal and thus easily learnable by speakers regardless of language background, as studies have shown. Conversely, our methodology allows one to argue which words are devoid of iconicity seeing as such words should not be explainable in terms of articulatory gesture. We use ideophones from Chaoyang (Southern Min) to illustrate our methodology.
Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative o... more Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative or iconic utterances by relying on vowels and consonants, leaving the supraseg-mental information unexplored. To begin bridging this gap, this study looks at the interaction of lexical tone and iconicity by comparing sound symbolic (i.e., mimetic, expressive, ideo-phonic) strata and general (i.e., arbitrary, prosaic, non-iconic) strata from three Chinese languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese Southern Min, Hong Kong Cantonese) using corpus-based means. For all three languages the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata are skewed so that the majority of syllables are largely confined to two tonal categories per language , one of which is high level, while the general strata exhibit no such tonal bias. These results indicate that phonological systematicity at the prosodic level might play an important role in demarcating an iconic class of words. This cross-linguistic tendency towards high tone mappings may be derived from phonotactic strategies to facilitate prosodic foreground-ing of iconic utterances as well as an embodiment of expressive voice and marked pitch use like that of Infant Directed Speech.
This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption t... more This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption that individual morphemes of multimorphemic words are represented according to a hierarchical structure. The results here support the psychological reality behind this assumption: Recognition of trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]) was significantly facilitated by prior processing of their substrings when the substrings served as morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., unkind), but not when the substrings were not morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., kindness). This morphological structural priming occurred independently of the linear positions of morphological constituents.
Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be structurally m... more Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be structurally marked, i.e., exhibiting unique structural properties. In this paper, “marked” is broadly used to mean phonologically marked (Dingemanse, 2021: Akita and Dingemanse, 2019). Using Cantonese ideophones as our case study, this paper measures sequential predictability within ideophones and non-ideophones, as a way to test their relative degree of structural markedness. We created a database of non-ideophones and ideophones from the Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus (HKCC) (Luke and Wong, 2015) and Mok (2001) and calculated the sequential predictability of each phoneme in various phonological contexts. The results indicate that Cantonese ideophones exhibit lower degrees of sequential predictability than non-ideophones, lending empirical support to the structural markedness of ideophones. We argue that non-ideophones exhibit a higher degree of sequential predictability because they follow the phonotactic regularities of Cantonese, whereas ideophones, to some degree, flout these regulations in favor of sequences of sounds that might better depict a given referent or percept.
Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and... more Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants’ are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task—a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly...
Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and... more Iconicity, or the resemblance between form and meaning, is often ascribed to a special status and contrasted with default assumptions of arbitrariness in spoken language. But does iconicity in spoken language have a special status when it comes to learnability? A simple way to gauge learnability is to see how well something is retrieved from memory. We can further contrast this with guessability, to see (1) whether the ease of guessing the meanings of ideophones outperforms the rate at which they are remembered; and (2) how willing participants' are to reassess what they were taught in a prior task-a novel contribution of this study. We replicate prior guessing and memory tasks using ideophones and adjectives from Japanese, Korean, and Igbo. Our results show that although native Cantonese speakers guessed ideophone meanings above chance level, they memorized both ideophones and adjectives with comparable accuracy. However, response time data show that participants took significantly longer to respond correctly to adjective-meaning pairs-indicating a discrepancy in a cognitive effort that favored the recognition of ideophones. In a follow-up reassessment task, participants who were taught foil translations were more likely to choose the true translations for ideophones rather than adjectives.
Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be structurally m... more Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery and are hypothesized to be structurally marked, i.e., exhibiting unique structural properties. In this paper, "marked" is broadly used to mean phonologically marked (Dingemanse, 2021: Akita and Dingemanse, 2019). Using Cantonese ideophones as our case study, this paper measures sequential predictability within ideophones and non-ideophones, as a way to test their relative degree of structural markedness. We created a database of non-ideophones and ideophones from the Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus (HKCC) (Luke and Wong, 2015) and Mok (2001) and calculated the sequential predictability of each phoneme in various phonological contexts. The results indicate that Cantonese ideophones exhibit lower degrees of sequential predictability than non-ideophones, lending empirical support to the structural markedness of ideophones. We argue that non-ideophones exhibit a higher degree of sequential predictability because they follow the phonotactic regularities of Cantonese, whereas ideophones, to some degree, flout these regulations in favor of sequences of sounds that might better depict a given referent or percept.
This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which c... more This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which collects 4948 unique onomatopoeia and ideophones (mimetics, expressives) of Mandarin, as well as Middle Chinese and Old Chinese. These are analyzed according to a wide range of variables, e.g., description, frequency. Apart from an overview of these variables, we provide a tutorial that shows how the database can be accessed in different formats (.rds, .xlsx, .csv, R package and online app interface), and how the database can be used to explore skewed tonal distribution across Mandarin ideophones. Since CHIDEOD is a data repository, potential future research applications are discussed.
Building on sound symbolism, which Hinton, Nichols & Ohala (1994: 1) define as ‘the direct linkag... more Building on sound symbolism, which Hinton, Nichols & Ohala (1994: 1) define as ‘the direct linkage between sound and meaning’, this paper will explore how some lexical items in Mandarin may be derived from imitatives. Imitatives (擬聲 詞 nǐshēngcí or onomatopoeia) are a category of lexical sound symbolism (Masuda 2002: 6) in which speech is used to mimic the sounds of the world (e.g. meow, vroom-vroom, ding-dong, bam) (Hinton et al. 1994: 3). The process of imitatives departing from their lexical (i.e. these onomatopoeias are well-formed Mandarin syllables and part of the general lexicon to serve an onomatopoeic function) onomatopoeic role and adopting arbitrary semantic functions is what I will call imitative shift. Sinitic has a long recorded history of imitatives shifting from the iconic side of the continuum to the more arbitrary (Li 2007: 151). Van Langendonck (2010: 394) states that “iconicity can be contrasted with ‘arbitrariness,’ or in Pierce’s terms, iconic is the opposite of...
Iconic words are supposed to exhibit imitative relationships between their linguistic forms and t... more Iconic words are supposed to exhibit imitative relationships between their linguistic forms and their referents. Many studies have worked to pinpoint sound-to-meaning correspondences for ideophones from different languages. The correspondence patterns show similarities across languages, but what makes such language-specific correspondences universal, as iconicity claims to be, remains unclear. This could be due to a lack of consensus on how to describe and test the perceptuo-motor affordances that make an iconic word feel imitative to speakers. We created and analysed a database of 1,860 ideophones across 13 languages, and found that seven articulatory features, physiologically accessible to all spoken language users, pattern according to semantic features of ideophones. Our findings pave the way for future research to utilize articulatory properties as a means to test and explain how iconicity is encoded in spoken language. The perspective taken here fits in with ongoing research o...
The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 ... more The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 processing, L2 language processing generally underuses grammatical information, prioritizing nongrammatical information. Specifically, this cross-modal priming study tests SSH at the level of morphology, investigating whether late advanced L2 learners construct hierarchically structured representations for trimorphemic derived words during real-time processing as native speakers do. Our results support SSH. In lexical decision on English trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]), L1 recognition of the targets was facilitated by their bimorphemic morphological-structural constituent primes (e.g., unkind), but not by their bimorphemic nonconstituent primes (e.g., kindness), which were only semantically and formally related to the target. In contrast, L2 recognition was equally facilitated by both constituent and nonconstituent primes. These results suggest that unlike L1 ...
Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as ‘sounding like what they mean,’ so that phono... more Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as ‘sounding like what they mean,’ so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog’s barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl- (Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning ‘light’ via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like ‘How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?’ So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By d...
Supplementary Materials for PhD thesis: Thompson, A. L. (2019). Movement as meaning: an articulat... more Supplementary Materials for PhD thesis: Thompson, A. L. (2019). Movement as meaning: an articulatory investigation into the iconicity of ideophones. (Unpublished doctoral thesis). the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR.
Iconicity is a resemblance between form and meaning grounded in perceptuo-motor analogy. In speec... more Iconicity is a resemblance between form and meaning grounded in perceptuo-motor analogy. In speech, iconicity is understood as words “sounding like what they mean.” Studies on English and Spanish use ratings to identify words speakers consider iconic. Perry et al. (2015) show that English onomatopoeia are rated highest, followed by adjectives/verbs > nouns > function words. Our study replicates this for Japanese but, owing to additional variables, yields more nuanced findings. Word-class aside, Japanese speakers are more likely to rate words as iconic if they are an (1) ideophone > (2) Yamato/native prosaic word > or (3) non-Yamato prosaic word. For comparison, we reanalyzed English ratings from Perry et al. (2015), and found neither strata (Germanic, Latinate, French) nor historically iconic etymology had a significant effect. With these factors in mind, we propose that ratings reflect a word’s relationship to sensory information rather than iconicity.
Some languages have more forms of conventional spoken iconicity than others. Japanese, for exampl... more Some languages have more forms of conventional spoken iconicity than others. Japanese, for example, has more ideophones than English. So how do speakers of a language with limited semantic categories of ideophones depict percepts? One possibility is demonstrations: unconventional, yet depictive, discourse. Demonstrations follow quotatives (e.g., I was like ___) and perform referents as opposed to describing them. In English, a language with arguably restricted sets of ideophones, speakers may enact/create demonstrations using their hands, voice, and body. This paper examines which visual and spoken components are vital to comprehending demonstrations in English with features from Güldemann's (2008) observations: enacted verbal behaviour, non-linguistic vocal imitation, ideophones, and representational gesture. 28 videos containing demonstrations of 11 celebrities engaging in impromptu storytelling on USA talk shows were our critical stimuli. 145 native speakers completed forced multiple-choice judgement tasks to qualify each demonstration. To see which forms of visual and spoken communication contributed to comprehension, videos were presented in visual (muted), audio (pixelated and darkened), and audiovisual (left as is) conditions. Our results show that if arbitrary speech (e.g., I was like I can't go over the ocean!) is in a demonstration, then it is vital to comprehension. The visual condition rendered these demonstrations uninterpretable. If sound imitations (e.g., I was like prfff!) or ideophones coupled with hand gesture (e.g., I was like yay! + hands opening and closing in unison) are in a demonstration, then the interpretability of that demonstration across our experimental conditions depends on whether its components (gesture, sound imitation) can unambiguously express meaning in isolation. These findings allow us to make several conjectures about the wellformedness of demonstrations. Our findings are in line with studies on enactments in deaf signed languages whereby the more unconventional a form of iconic depiction is, the more it requires conventional framing to be interpretable.
This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption t... more This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption that individual morphemes of multimorphemic words are represented according to a hierarchical structure. The results here support the psychological reality behind this assumption: Recognition of trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]) was significantly facilitated by prior processing of their substrings when the substrings served as morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., unkind), but not when the substrings were not morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., kindness). This morphological structural priming occurred independently of the linear positions of morphological constituents.
This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which c... more This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which collects 4948 unique onomatopoeia and ideophones (mimetics, expressives) of Mandarin, as well as Middle Chinese and Old Chinese. These are analyzed according to a wide range of variables, e.g., description, frequency. Apart from an overview of these variables, we provide a tutorial that shows how the database can be accessed in different formats (.rds, .xlsx, .csv, R package and online app interface), and how the database can be used to explore skewed tonal distribution across Mandarin ideophones. Since CHIDEOD is a data repository, potential future research applications are discussed.
Some languages have more forms of conventional spoken iconicity than others. Japanese, for exampl... more Some languages have more forms of conventional spoken iconicity than others. Japanese, for example, has more ideophones than English. So how do speakers of a language with limited semantic categories of ideophones depict percepts? One possibility is demonstrations: unconventional, yet depictive, discourse. Demonstrations follow quotatives (e.g., I was like ___) and perform referents as opposed to describing them. In English, a language with arguably restricted sets of ideophones, speakers may enact/create demonstrations using their hands, voice, and body. This paper examines which visual and spoken components are vital to comprehending demonstrations in English with features from Güldemann's (2008) observations: enacted verbal behaviour, non-linguistic vocal imitation, ideophones, and representational gesture. 28 videos containing demonstrations of 11 celebrities engaging in impromptu storytelling on USA talk shows were our critical stimuli. 145 native speakers completed forced multiple-choice judgement tasks to qualify each demonstration. To see which forms of visual and spoken communication contributed to comprehension, videos were presented in visual (muted), audio (pixelated and darkened), and audiovisual (left as is) conditions. Our results show that if arbitrary speech (e.g., I was like I can't go over the ocean!) is in a demonstration, then it is vital to comprehension. The visual condition rendered these demonstrations uninterpretable. If sound imitations (e.g., I was like prfff!) or ideophones coupled with hand gesture (e.g., I was like yay! + hands opening and closing in unison) are in a demonstration, then the interpretability of that demonstration across our experimental conditions depends on whether its components (gesture, sound imitation) can unambiguously express meaning in isolation. These findings allow us to make several conjectures about the wellformedness of demonstrations. Our findings are in line with studies on enactments in deaf signed languages whereby the more unconventional a form of iconic depiction is, the more it requires conventional framing to be interpretable.
Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as 'sounding like what they mean,' so that phono... more Iconicity is when linguistic units are perceived as 'sounding like what they mean,' so that phonological structure of an iconic word is what begets its meaning through perceived imitation, rather than an arbitrary semantic link. Fundamental examples are onomatopoeia, e.g., dog's barking: woof woof (English), wou wou (Cantonese), wan wan (Japanese), hau hau (Polish). Systematicity is often conflated with iconicity because it is also a phenomenon whereby a word begets its meaning from phonological structure, albeit through (arbitrary) statistical relationships, as opposed to perceived imitation. One example is gl-(Germanic languages), where speakers can intuit the meaning 'light' via knowledge of similar words, e.g., glisten, glint, glow, gleam, glimmer. This conflation of iconicity and systematicity arises from questions like 'How can we differentiate or qualify perceived imitation from (arbitrary) statistical relationships?' So far there is no proposal to answer this question. By drawing observations from the visual modality, this paper mediates ambiguity between iconicity and systematicity in spoken language by proposing a methodology which explains how iconicity is achieved through perceptuo-motor analogies derived from oral articulatory gesture. We propose that universal accessibility of articulatory gestures, and human ability to create (perceptuo-motor) analogy, is what in turn makes iconicity universal and thus easily learnable by speakers regardless of language background, as studies have shown. Conversely, our methodology allows one to argue which words are devoid of iconicity seeing as such words should not be explainable in terms of articulatory gesture. We use ideophones from Chaoyang (Southern Min) to illustrate our methodology.
Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative o... more Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative or iconic utterances by relying on vowels and consonants, leaving the supraseg-mental information unexplored. To begin bridging this gap, this study looks at the interaction of lexical tone and iconicity by comparing sound symbolic (i.e., mimetic, expressive, ideo-phonic) strata and general (i.e., arbitrary, prosaic, non-iconic) strata from three Chinese languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese Southern Min, Hong Kong Cantonese) using corpus-based means. For all three languages the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata are skewed so that the majority of syllables are largely confined to two tonal categories per language , one of which is high level, while the general strata exhibit no such tonal bias. These results indicate that phonological systematicity at the prosodic level might play an important role in demarcating an iconic class of words. This cross-linguistic tendency towards high tone mappings may be derived from phonotactic strategies to facilitate prosodic foreground-ing of iconic utterances as well as an embodiment of expressive voice and marked pitch use like that of Infant Directed Speech.
This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption t... more This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption that individual morphemes of multimorphemic words are represented according to a hierarchical structure. The results here support the psychological reality behind this assumption: Recognition of trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]) was significantly facilitated by prior processing of their substrings when the substrings served as morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., unkind), but not when the substrings were not morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., kindness). This morphological structural priming occurred independently of the linear positions of morphological constituents.
Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019), 2019
Iconic words are known to exhibit an imitative relationship between a word and its referent. Many... more Iconic words are known to exhibit an imitative relationship between a word and its referent. Many studies have worked to pinpoint sound-to-meaning correspondences for ideophones from different languages. The correspondence patterns show similarities across languages, but what makes such language-specific correspondences universal, as iconicity claims to be, remains unclear. This could be due to a lack of consensus on how to describe and test the perceptuo-motor affordances that make an iconic word feel imitative to speakers. We created and analyzed a database of 1,888 ideophones across 13 languages, and found that 5 articulatory properties, physiologically accessible to all spoken language users, pattern according to semantic features of ideophones. Our findings pave the way for future research to utilize articulatory properties as a means to test and explain how iconicity is encoded in spoken language.
Using evidence from Indo-European roots to argue why phonaesthemes should be considered a systema... more Using evidence from Indo-European roots to argue why phonaesthemes should be considered a systematic, rather than iconic, means of encoding meaning.
Preliminary documentation of fieldwork on the phonology of Shakou Hakka spoken in Shakou Township... more Preliminary documentation of fieldwork on the phonology of Shakou Hakka spoken in Shakou Township, Yingde County, Guangdong Province, P.R. China. Shakou Hakka (Northern Guangdong) is phonologically distinct from the southern variety by Lee and Zee (2009) and Mok (2001).
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