Valence sound symbolism across language families: a comparison between Japanese and German
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In: Language and Cognition Volume 15 / Issue 2 (2022-12-13) , S. 337-354; eissn:1866-9859
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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.
@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} }