Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is now well-established that the visual features of objects influence the sounds we make to refer to them. This is called sound symbolism. We present the results of a two-part study that explores the extent to which the visual features of writing systems correspond to the smallest spoken units of language. In Study 1, participants (n = 322) classified the shape of a set of glyphs, representative of the world's script families. The purpose was to create an open-source database of normed glyphs for future research in cognitive linguistics. In Study 2, participants (n = 73) were prompted to select either a round or angular glyph after hearing one of two kinds of phonemes (vowel or consonant) from the International Phonetic Alphabet. Results from a logistic regression suggest that the type of sound had a significant effect on the choice of glyph, and that vowel sounds increased the likelihood of choosing round glyphs by 30%. The significant correlation between what subjects heard and their choice of glyph suggests that the effect may extend to such sound symbolic relations in real-world writing systems. Our ongoing research seeks to substantiate these findings with increased glyph contrast and more diverse populations.