The audiovisual structure of onomatopoeias: An intrusion of real-world physics in lexical creation

ALAN TAITZ; MARÍA FLORENCIA ASSANEO; NATALIA ELISEI; MÓNICA TRÍPODI; LAURENT COHEN; JACOBO SITT; MARCOS A TREVISAN

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Lugar: San Francisco; Año: 2018

1932-6203

Sound-symbolic word classes are found in different cultures and languages worldwide. These words are continuously produced to code complex information about events. Here we explore the capacity of creative language to transport complex multisensory information in a controlled experiment, where our participants improvised onomatopoeias from noisy moving objects in audio, visual and audiovisual formats.Wefound that consonants commu- nicate movement types (slide, hit or ring) mainly through the manner of articulation in the vocal tract. Vowels communicate shapes in visual stimuli (spiky or rounded) and sound fre- quencies in auditory stimuli through the configuration of the lips and tongue. A machine learning model was trained to classify movement types and used to validate generalizations of our results across formats.Weimplemented the classifier with a list of cross-linguistic onomatopoeias simple actions were correctly classified, while different aspects were selected to build onomatopoeias of complex actions. These results show how the different aspects of complex sensory information are coded and how they interact in the creation of novel onomatopoeias.