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Valence sound symbolism across language families: a comparison between Japanese and German

Körner, Anita
Rummer, Ralf

Vowels are associated with valence, so that words containing /i/ (as in English meet) compared with /o/ (as in French rose) are typically judged to match positively valenced persons and objects. As yet, valence sound symbolism has been mainly observed for Indo-European languages. The present research extends this to a comparison of Japanese-speaking and German-speaking participants. Participants invented pseudo-words as names for faces with different emotional expressions (happy vs. neutral vs. sad vs. angry). For both Japanese-speaking and German-speaking participants, vowel usage depended on emotional valence. The vowel I was used more for positive (vs. other) expressions, whereas O and U were used less for positive (vs. other) expressions. A was associated with positive emotional valence for Japanese-speaking but not German-speaking participants. In sum, emotional valence associations of I (vs. rounded vowels) were similar in German and Japanese, suggesting that sound symbolism for emotional valence is not language specific.

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Gefördert im Rahmen eines Open-Access-Transformationsvertrags mit dem Verlag
Citation
In: Language and Cognition Volume 15 / Issue 2 (2022-12-13) , S. 337-354; eissn:1866-9859
Collections
@article{doi:10.17170/kobra-202305057957,
  author    ={Körner, Anita and Rummer, Ralf},
  title    ={Valence sound symbolism across language families: a comparison between Japanese and German},
  keywords ={400 and Japanisch and Deutsch and Valenz  and Lautsymbolik and Ikon and Artikulation},
  copyright  ={http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/},
  language ={en},
  journal  ={Language and Cognition},
  year   ={2022-12-13}
}