Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although the relationship between the sound of each word and its meaning is generally arbitrary, onomatopoeias are said to have the unarbitrary link, which called sound-symbolism, between them. In this study, we investigated whether sound symbolic words are widely common in a class of onomatopoeias in some natural language. We conducted an experiment, which asked Japanese and non-Japanese speakers to match each given Japanese-onomatopoeia-like sound with a shape to which the sound referred. The result of analysis showed a similar structure for both speaker groups, in which round shapes were associated to a particular set of sounds and pointed shapes associated to the other set of sounds. Moreover, the round/ pointed shapes are correlated to pseudo onomatopoeias with sonorants/ fricative phonetic features. This finding supports the sound symbolic hypothesis asserting that the major component of Japanese onomatopoeias forms a bouba-kiki like sound-shape correspondence even for non-Japanese speakers.