Japanese Sound-Symbolic Words for Representing the Hardness of an Object Are Judged Similarly by Japanese and English Speakers

Li Shan Wong; Jinhwan Kwon; Zane Zheng; Suzy J Styles; Maki Sakamoto; Ryo Kitada

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.830306

Japanese Sound-Symbolic Words for Representing the Hardness of an Object Are Judged Similarly by Japanese and English Speakers

Front Psychol. 2022 Mar 15:13:830306. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.830306. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Li Shan Wong¹, Jinhwan Kwon², Zane Zheng³, Suzy J Styles¹, Maki Sakamoto⁴, Ryo Kitada^{1

5}

Affiliations

¹ Division of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
² Faculty of Education, Kyoto University of Education, Kyoto, Japan.
³ Department of Psychology, Lasell University, Newton, MA, United States.
⁴ Department of Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics and Engineering, The University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Japan.
⁵ Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan.

Abstract

Contrary to the assumption of arbitrariness in modern linguistics, sound symbolism, which is the non-arbitrary relationship between sounds and meanings, exists. Sound symbolism, including the "Bouba-Kiki" effect, implies the universality of such relationships; individuals from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds can similarly relate sound-symbolic words to referents, although the extent of these similarities remains to be fully understood. Here, we examined if subjects from different countries could similarly infer the surface texture properties from words that sound-symbolically represent hardness in Japanese. We prepared Japanese sound-symbolic words of which novelty was manipulated by a genetic algorithm (GA). Japanese speakers in Japan and English speakers in both Singapore and the United States rated these words based on surface texture properties (hardness, warmness, and roughness), as well as familiarity. The results show that hardness-related words were rated as harder and rougher than softness-related words, regardless of novelty and countries. Multivariate analyses of the ratings classified the hardness-related words along the hardness-softness dimension at over 80% accuracy, regardless of country. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the number of speech sounds /g/ and /k/ predicted the ratings of the surface texture properties in non-Japanese countries, suggesting a systematic relationship between phonetic features of a word and perceptual quality represented by the word across culturally and linguistically diverse samples.

Keywords: Japanese; hardness; material perception; sound symbolism; touch.