2011 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Universals in Sound Iconicity

Research Project

Project/Area Number	22720170
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	Linguistics
Research Institution	Doshisha University
Principal Investigator	AURACHER Jan 同志社大学, 言語文化教育研究センター, 助教 (10548035)
Project Period (FY)	2010 – 2011
Keywords	Sound Iconicity
Research Abstract	Objectives of the research were to explore the potential of sound iconicity for computer based text analysis. To this end, a corpus with texts from various languages and genres was collected. Texts within this corpus were analyzed using a range of methods, such as phonetic analysis, word count and word classification. All these methods were compared to the assessment of selected texts by readers. Results give sufficient evidence to claim a universal relation between the relative occurrence of phonemes with distinct acoustic features and the emotional tone expressed in a text. At the same time, it seems that this relation only holds true for texts with extreme values, that is, texts, which show an unusual high occurrence of phonemes with one specific characteristic (e.g., a plosive onset) and ? at the same time ? a relative low occurrence of phonemes with the opposite characteristic (e.g., a continuant onset).