UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report

Sound symbolism is the hypothesized property for sounds to convey semantic meaning. Shinohara and Kawahara (2010) proposed that features of vowels (frontness, height) and obstruents (voicing) cause listeners to perceive words as either larger or smaller. Study 1 firstly replicates the original experiment then repeats the experiment using a speech perception paradigm. The speech perception experiment assesses whether listeners perceive sizes differently between spoken language and visual reading. The results from Study 1 were consistent with Shinohara and Kawahara (2010) except that words with /u/ were perceived as smaller in our results. We hypothesized that this result may be due to u-fronting which is an iconic feature of Californian English so we repeated both the written word and speech perception experiments in Study 2 with non-Californian English speakers. Our results support Shinohara and Kawahara’s claims and suggest that speakers perceive dialect-specific phonetic properties from written word.