Sound-Meaning Correlations Among 1,000 English Words

Abstract

From a theoretic standpoint, phonetic symbolism experiments thus far have dealt with “phonemic symbolism”; there are two hypotheses, not one, under investigation. This study focuses on the hypothesis that attitudinal meanings of macro-units in language co-vary to some degree with the attitudinal meanings of micro-units composing them. Using semantic differential ratings and phonemic transcriptions for 1,000 English words, it is shown that: (1) words in which certain phonemes occur do tend to have characteristic attitudinal meanings; (2) attitudinal meanings predicted for words from their phonemic content do correlate with the actual attitudinal meanings (r's range from 0.21 to 0.27; all are significant with p < 0.001). It is found that phoneme meanings derived from the ratings of natural words and those derived previously from ratings of artificial words do not correlate; various possible interpretations of this finding are discussed.

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