Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies of meaning-sound systematicity haveconsistently found a small but significant positive correlationbetween semantics and phonology. The current study addsfurther evidence from an etymologically distinct language,Korean. Through multiple methods, the study shows thatsimilar sounds tend to have similar meanings in Koreanmonosyllables. Several cultural aspects of the language are alsoquantified. Pure Korean words return stronger meaning-soundcorrelation than Sino-Korean words, which is attributable tothe higher portion of homonyms in Sino-Korean. The mostfrequent words show the strongest systematicity, whichpermeates all of the monosyllables. Certain types of vowelsseem to contribute to this effect.