Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theoretical linguists have hypothesized that the vocalization of the initial consonants in Japanese sound-symbolic wordsaffect their psychological evaluations. By using 5-point semantic differential scales associated with 13 psycholinguis-tic features (familiarity, visual imagery, auditory imagery, haptic imagery, arousal, preference, disgust, hardness, soft-ness, heaviness, lightness, fastness, and slowness), we asked 36 Japanese participants to evaluate sound-symbolic wordswith voiceless (SSWVL; e.g., kirakira) or voiced initial consonants (SSWV; e.g., giragira) in experiment 1, whereas weasked them to evaluate sound-symbolic words with semi-voiced consonants (SSWSV; e.g., pochapocha) or SSWV (e.g.,bochabocha) in experiment 2. Results of experiments 1 and 2 showed that the participants had higher levels of disgust,arousal, hardness, heaviness, and slowness for SSWV as opposed to SSWVL and SSWSV (ps ¡ .05). In sum, these find-ings suggest that the presence of vocalization of initial consonants in Japanese sound-symbolic words contribute to theirpsychological evaluations to sound-symbolic words.