Phonetic Symbolism in Adult Native Speakers of Czech

Abstract

10 monolingual adult speakers of Czech were asked to label elliptical and triangular figures of different size with phonetic nonsense syllables. The purpose of the study was to obtain evidence in support of the "phonetic symbolism " hypothesis, and to attempt to replicate the findings of Tarte and Barritt (1971) with English speakers. Subjects agreed about the relationship between vowel sounds and the size and shape of figures, both between themselves and compared to the findings with speakers of English. The sound /a/ was preferred with large figures, /i/ with small; /u/ was chosen more often with ellipses, /i/ with triangles. It was concluded that this study does lend support to the existence of phonetic symbolism and its generality.