The anatomy of onomatopoeia

M.F. ASSANEO; J.I. NICHOLS; M. A. TREVISAN

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Año: 2011

1932-6203

Virtually every human faculty engage with imitation. One of the most natural and unexplored objects for the study of the mimetic elements in language is the onomatopoeia, as it implies the transformation of asound of nature into a word. Notably, what is acoustically preserved in this operation is somewhat elusive.To overcome this obstacle we test a definition for vocal imitation by which sounds are transformed into speech elements optimizing the acoustical similitude within the constraints of the vocal system.We adapt a computational model that allows recovering anatomical features of the human vocal system from experimental sound data. The model is tested by reconstructing the vocal tract anatomy of vowels and fricative consonants from voice recordings, which are successfully compared to experimental MRI-based data and consistently recognized by a population of listeners. We then explore the vocal configurations that best reproduce non-speech sounds, like striking blows on a door or the sharp sounds generated by pressing on light switches or computer mouse buttons. The vocal configurations obtained are readily associated with well known coarticulated speech sounds. Notably, these configurations correspond to the most stable syllables found in the knock and click onomatopoeias across languages.Other mimetic forces received extensive attention by the scientific community, such as cross-modal associations between speech and visual categories. The present approach helps building a global view of the mimetic forces acting on language and opens a new venue for a quantitative study of word formation in terms of vocal imitation.