Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity

Tag: ideophones

  • What sound symbolism can and cannot do: new paper in Language

    We have a new paper out in Language: Dingemanse, Mark, Will Schuerman, Eva Reinisch, Sylvia Tufvesson, and Holger Mitterer. 2016. “What Sound Symbolism Can and Cannot Do: Testing the Iconicity of Ideophones from Five Languages.” Language 92 (2): e117–33. doi:10.1353/lan.2016.0034 The basic finding is this: people are sensitive to the meaning of ideophones they’ve never heard,…