Sound Symbolism in sighted and Blind. The role of vision and orthography in sound-shape correspondences.
(2018) The Blind Brain Workshop on the sensory deprived brain (BBW) — Location: Lucca - Italy (11.October.2018)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- Non-arbitrary sound-shape correspondences (SSC), such as the “bouba-kiki” effect, have been consistently observed across languages and, together with other sound-symbolic phenomena, challenge the classic linguistic dictum of the arbitrariness of the sign. Yet, it is unclear what makes a sound “round” or “spiky” to the human mind. Testing people who interact with the world in a systematically different way may represent, therefore, a compelling model to test how specific experience shapes the development of SSC. In two separate experiments, we tested 39 early blind (EB) and sighted control (SC) people in order to probe the role visual experience plays in shaping the development of SSC. In a first experiment, blind and blindfolded sighted participants (30 per group) were asked to associate the pseudowords ‘maluma’ and ‘takete’ with various 3D shapes. In contrast to previous findings (Fryer et al., 2014), we observed that non-arbitrary phoneme-shape association equally manifested in both groups. In a second follow-up experiment, participants (18 per group) listened to 240 invented words and rated them as ‘round’ or ‘pointy’. Words were composed by different consonant classes that are associated with various degrees of articulatory and orthographic spikiness. Here again the results showed that SSC emerged in both groups. However, a partially different pattern of SSC emerged in sighted and blind. Such relative difference was mostly explained by a different effect of orthographic letter shape: The shape of written letters influenced SSC in the sighted, but not in the blind, who are exposed to an orthography (Braille) in which letters do not have spiky or round outlines. In sum, early blindness does not prevent the emergence of SSC, and differences between sighted and blind people may be related to the indirect influence (or lack thereof) of orthographic letter shape.
- Affiliations
University of Trento Center for Mind/Brain Science CIMeC
Citations
Barilari, M., Bottini, R., & Collignon, O. (2018). Sound Symbolism in sighted and Blind. The role of vision and orthography in sound-shape correspondences. The Blind Brain Workshop on the sensory deprived brain (BBW), Lucca - Italy. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100459