<p>The focus of this essay is on examining the meanings of the <em>onomatopoeia</em> (sound imitating words) <em>snap, crack</em> and <em>pop</em>. Previous studies on onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are used to define the terms and create a model for an alternative categorization of these meanings. This model is then applied in a corpus study, conducted on the COCA (Corpus Of Contemporary American English) and BYU-BNC (The British National Corpus) corpora, to find a way to more accurately describe the meanings and functions of these words.  For this purpose the context in which <em>snap, crack</em> and<em> pop</em> are used is also addressed by observing how frequently they occur in formal and informal texts and which adjectives and adverbs frequently modify them. In the study it was discovered that these three words took on many different meanings that would be hard to list separately in a dictionary. These meanings did follow a pattern linked to the properties associated with the word. The study found <em>snap, crack and pop</em> to be informal words with a tendency to add emotion or effect to a statement. It is therefore concluded that sorting onomatopoeia by sound and non sound-related meaning and describing the informal characteristics of these words leads to a greater understanding of how they are used.</p><p> </p><p>Keywords: Arbitrariness, <em>crack</em>, emotive, ideophones, mimetics, mimes, non-arbitrariness, onomatopoeia, phenomimes, phonomimes, <em>pop</em>, psychomimes, register, semantics, <em>snap</em>, sound symbolism and style.</p>

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

語音表義教學雖已被學者提倡使用在字彙學習之領域多年，然而其在課室英語字彙教學的實際成效仍未獲證實。本研究先採用量化研究方法以探究語音表義教學對於國中生英語單字記憶之成效，再採用質性研究方法探討受試者對語音表義教學法之看法。 研究對象為台灣北部一所公立國中九年級兩個班的七十二位學生。此均質的兩個班級被隨機指定為實驗組與控制組，實驗組施予語音表義教學法學習八十個標的單字，而控制組則施予傳統翻譯式教學法學習相同的單字。接受歷時十六週的字彙教學後，以兩組學生在認字測驗上的成績以及實驗組學生個別訪談之結果作為資料分析來源。本研究主要發現如下：(1)接受語音表義教學的實驗組學生在認字測驗的表現上顯著優於接受傳統翻譯法的控制組學生。(2)實驗組中，高分群組與低分群組在接受語音表義教學後，在認字測驗的表現上皆呈現出顯著性進步，顯示出語音表義教學對不同程度的學生皆有成效。(3)受試者對語音表義教學持正面態度，且認為語音表義教學特別是在認字方面有助於英語字彙之記憶。研究最後進一步對語音表義教學在實際教學上之應用提供建議，作為教育學者們參考。 / Although the instruction of sound symbolism has been advocated for word learning for years, it is not clear whether it is empirically effective in classroom vocabulary teaching. This study first adopted a quantitative research method to investigate the effectiveness of the instruction of sound symbolism on junior high school students’ English vocabulary memorization, and then a qualitative research method to explore the participants’ perspectives on the instruction of sound symbolism. Participants of the study were two classes of 72 ninth-grade students in a public junior high school in northern Taiwan. With homogeneity in terms of English language proficiency, the two classes were randomly assigned as the experimental and control group. The former was instructed 80 target words by the instruction of sound symbolism, while the latter was taught the same target words by the traditional translation-based approach. Vocabulary instruction lasted for 16 weeks, and the data analysis was based on their performances on the word recognition test and the results of the individual interviews. The major findings are as follows. (1)The participants who received the instruction of sound symbolism performed significantly better on the word recognition test than those who were taught the traditional translation-based approach. (2) In the experimental group, both the high and low proficiency learners made significant progress, indicating the instruction of sound symbolism was effective in different proficiency groups. (3) The participants held positive attitude toward the instruction of sound symbolism and felt that the instruction was helpful for vocabulary memorization, especially on the aspect of word recognition. Some pedagogical implications and recommendations for future research were presented at the end of the thesis.

This paper proposes that SOUND SYMBOLISM, and more specifically PHONEMIC ICONICITY, plays a role in conveying emotional weight in the context of poetry. Previous research has indicated that the ratio of plosives to nasals in poetry predicts overall perception of emotional affect, with plosives designating activity and pleasantness, and nasals designating inactivity and unpleasantness (Auracher, Albers, Zhai, Gareeva, & Stavniychuk 2010); however, this research has ignored the influence of such potentially mitigating factors as orthography and lexical meaning. The current study involves naive English L1 speakers listening to recordings of selected haiku from Matsuo Basho's Oku No Hosomichi (`Narrow Road to the Deep North') in the original Japanese, and as such, the potential of orthography and lexical meaning to influence perception of emotion is eliminated. After listening to each haiku twice, subjects were asked to rate the appropriateness of eight emotion words that ranged from active and positive to inactive and positive, and from active and negative to inactive and negative, on a five-point Likert scale. Emotion words were chosen on the basis of their respective positions on the Circumplex Model of Affect, in which each emotion is conceptualized in terms of its location along two intersecting axes measuring valence (negative - positive) and arousal (inactive - active) (Russell 1980). The selected words occupied regularly spaced positions along this two-dimensional circular model. Results indicate that plosive to nasal ratio may indeed play a role in the perception of emotion in poetry, particularly in the case of poems with high plosive to nasal ratios, which were perceived as markedly more active and positive than other poems. Wider implications of the discernible patterns of perception of emotional affect based on plosive to nasal ratio include the possibility that phonemic iconicity plays a role in general language processing. As this research involves Japanese L2 phonemic perception by naÃ&hibar;ve English L1 listeners, current L2 phonological perceptual theory is discussed, and taken into account in the analysis of the results. Specific consideration is given to the potential of English L1 speakers to perceive the Japanese rhotic /r/, which does not appear in English, as the plosives /t/ or /d/, and the Japanese affricate /ts/, which commonly appears syllable-initially in Japanese, but is much rarer in this position in English, as /s/ (Nozawa 2008). Future research on English L1 speakers' underlying perceptual categorizations of targeted sounds in Japanese is also proposed.

The aim of this essay is to examine whether language is iconic or arbitrary in the issue of onomatopoeia, i.e. whether animal sounds are represented in the same way in different languages. In addition, I will also look at onomatopoeical words which have been conventionalised, when the meaning broadened and they finally became part of ordinary language. It can be stated that arbitrary signs have slowly taken over as different languages have developed, but the reason why is a topic for discussion – is there a scientific cause, based on the theory of evolution, or an explanation found in religious myths? Whatever the reason is, it is not likely that iconicity will vanish totally. It is connected to human neurophysiology and an ancient part of language, a natural resemblance between an object and a sign which can exist in different forms. Onomatopoeia is one example of iconic signs, an object named after the sound it produces, and according to one theory conventionalised imitations is actually the origin of language. Nevertheless, there are two main categories – language being either iconic or arbitrary. Regarding onomatopoeia, my results suggest that language is only iconic to a limited extent. English and Swedish have some common representations of animal sounds, but the languages also differ in many ways. Conventionalising seems common in both languages and many of the words in my survey have been incorporated in dictionaries, representing more than only the sound of a certain animal.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Phonological awareness, or the ability to manipulate sounds, has been found to be highly correlated with the acquisition of reading skills. This awareness may be influenced by the orthography or language system in which the child is learning to read. In addition, different aspects of phonological awareness may also apply to different stages of reading development. This study found that depth of orthography does not seem to influence initial levels of phonological awareness. After two years of reading instruction, readers of a transparent orthography are better at phoneme segmentation and blending and reading nonwords than readers of an opaque orthography. Afrikaans children appear to begin leading in an alphabetic stage using a nonlexical strategy of grapheme-phoneme conversion. English beginner readers seem to start reading using predominantly a logographic strategy of visual word recognition. It also seems that some levels of phonological awareness such as onset/rime detection and syllable manipulation are acquired spontaneously by prereaders of both languages, but that the manipulation of phonemic units is dependent on the acquisition of literacy. The introduction of literacy training and/or the maturation of the children's phonological systems results in a change to a greater awareness of small phonemic units than larger units. / AC2017

The focus of this essay is on examining the meanings of the onomatopoeia (sound imitating words) snap, crack and pop. Previous studies on onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are used to define the terms and create a model for an alternative categorization of these meanings. This model is then applied in a corpus study, conducted on the COCA (Corpus Of Contemporary American English) and BYU-BNC (The British National Corpus) corpora, to find a way to more accurately describe the meanings and functions of these words.  For this purpose the context in which snap, crack and pop are used is also addressed by observing how frequently they occur in formal and informal texts and which adjectives and adverbs frequently modify them. In the study it was discovered that these three words took on many different meanings that would be hard to list separately in a dictionary. These meanings did follow a pattern linked to the properties associated with the word. The study found snap, crack and pop to be informal words with a tendency to add emotion or effect to a statement. It is therefore concluded that sorting onomatopoeia by sound and non sound-related meaning and describing the informal characteristics of these words leads to a greater understanding of how they are used.   Keywords: Arbitrariness, crack, emotive, ideophones, mimetics, mimes, non-arbitrariness, onomatopoeia, phenomimes, phonomimes, pop, psychomimes, register, semantics, snap, sound symbolism and style.

Un mot et une signification peuvent entretenir une relation naturelle, motivée, plutôt qu’arbitraire, via la composition segmentale dudit mot. Ce phénomène est souvent appelé symbolisme sonore, même si nous préfèrerons employer le terme de motivation par la suite. Dans la littérature, des éléments en faveur d’une relation motivée apparaissent à la fois dans des analyses translinguistiques et des expérimentations psycholinguistiques. Par exemple, une voyelle fermée telle que [i] est davantage associée à la petitesse qu’une voyelle ouverte telle que [a], davantage associée à une taille importante. Ce schéma apparait à la fois dans les lexiques de différentes langues (Ohala, 1997) et dans les résultats de tâches d’associations (Sapir, 1929), avec des participants parlant différentes langues et à différents âges. Du fait de ces éléments communs (Iwasaki et al., 2007) et de leur précocité (Ozturk et al., 2013), il est possible de formuler l’hypothèse que la motivation a pu être un élément clé dans l’émergence du langage (Imai et al., 2015), en facilitant les interactions et l’accord entre les individus.Cette thèse offre plusieurs contributions méthodologiques à l’étude des associations motivées entre formes phonétiques et significations. La première étude a pour objectif de déterminer si des caractéristiques associées à des animaux (e.g. la dangerosité) ou à leurs catégories biologiques (oiseaux vs. poissons, sur la base de l’étude conduite par Berlin en 1994)peuvent représenter des concepts pertinents dans la mise en évidence d’associations motivées, en se basant sur l’hypothèse que les animaux étaient des sujets récurrents et importants des premières interactions langagières (en tant que potentielles sources de nourriture ou de menace). Cette étude a soulevé des questions méthodologiques, qui ont conduit à une seconde étude, dont le but était de comparer différents protocoles de tâches d’association que l’on peut trouver dans les études sur la motivation. En effet, les protocoles et les populations étudiées varient d’une étude à l’autre, et il est ainsi difficile de déterminer quel est le contraste le plus déterminant pour la mise en valeur expérimentale d’associations motivées : le contraste phonétique, ou le contraste conceptuel. Cette deuxième étude a ainsi permis d’apprécier l’influence de différents protocoles en contrôlant d’autres sources de variations à travers les différentes tâches. Elle a aussi permis de mettre en évidence la nécessité d’étudier davantage les processus cognitifs impliqués dans les associations. Ainsi, nous avons poursuivi notre investigation en noustournant vers l’influence de la forme des lettres, un facteur potentiellement déterminant dans les tâches ‘bouba-kiki’, comme l’ont proposé Cuskley et al. (2015). Bouba-kiki est un paradigme très répandu dans l’étude des associations motivées et consiste à associer des pseudomots avec des formes pointues ou arrondies. Cuskley et al. ont proposé qu’une forme pointuefaciliterait le traitement d’un pseudo-mot contenant une lettre anguleuse, telle que ‘k’. Dans notre troisième étude, nous avons adopté une version implicite de la tâche bouba-kiki, plus précisément une tâche de décision lexicale, en nous basant sur une étude antérieure de Westbury (2005). Dans cette expérience précédente, des cadres pointus et arrondis, dans lesquels apparaissaient les stimuli linguistiques, facilitaient le traitement de pseudo-mots en fonction de leurs compositions segmentales (e.g. les formes pointues accéléraient le traitement d’occlusives non-voisées telle que [k]). Nous avons manipulé les formes des lettres via deux polices de caractères différentes, une anguleuse et une curviligne, et avons ainsi essayé de démêler lesimpacts respectifs des formes des cadres et des polices sur les temps de réponse des participants. Les résultats ont mis en lumière l’importance de prendre en considération des processus visuels de bas-niveau dans l’étude des associations motivées. / Sound symbolism, or motivation as we will later refer to it, corresponds to the assumption that some words have a natural relation with their significations, instead of an arbitrary one, through their segmental composition. Some evidence stands out from the literature, from cross-linguistic investigations to psycholinguistic experimentations. For example, a closed vowel [i] is more associated to smallness, while an open vowel like [a] is more associated to largeness. This pattern appears in the lexicon of different languages (e.g. Ohala, 1997), as well as in results of associative tasks (Sapir, 1929) with participants speakingdifferent languages and at different life stages. These commonalities (e.g. Iwasaki, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2007) and their earliness (e.g. Ozturk, Krehm, & Vouloumanos, 2013) enable to formulate the hypothesis that motivation may have represented a key-driver in the emergence of language (Imai et al., 2015), by facilitating interactions and agreement between individuals.This thesis offers several methodological contributions to the study of motivated associations. The first study of this thesis aimed at assessing whether animal features (e.g. dangerousness) or biological classes (birds vs. fish, based on Berlin, 1994) would be relevant concepts for highlighting motivated associations, based on the assumption that animals would have represented suitable candidates for the content of early interactions (as potential sources of food and threats). It raised issues regarding methodological settings which led to the second study consisting in comparing different protocols of association tasks that are found across experimentations. Indeed, in the literature, the settings and population vary from one study to another, and it is therefore not possible to determine which one of the two types of contrasts implied in association tasks is determinant for making associations: either the phonetic one or the conceptual one. This second study permitted to appraise the influence of different protocols by controlling for other sources of variation across the tasks. It also highlighted the need to better analyze the cognitive processes involved in motivated associations. This led us to complement our investigation of phonetic and conceptual contrast with a study on the influence of the graphemic shapes of letters, following Cuskley, Simmer and Kirby (2015)’s proposal of an impact of the shapes of letters in the bouba-kiki task. This task is a well-known paradigm in the study of motivated associations, based on associating pseudo-words with round or spiky shapes. Cuskley et al. suggested that a spiky shape would facilitate the processing of a pseudoword that contains an angular letter such as ‘k’. On our third study, we considered an implicit version of the ‘bouba-kiki’ task, namely a lexical decision task, building on a previous experiment by Westbury (2005). In this experiment, spiky and round frames, in which the linguistic stimuli appeared, seemed to facilitate the processing of pseudo-words according to their segmental composition (e.g. spiky frames would facilitate the processing of voiceless plosives like [k]). We manipulated the shapes of letters with two different fonts for displaying linguistic stimuli – one angular and one curvy – and tried to disentangle the respective impacts of frames and of these fonts on the participants’ response times. The results highlighted the importance of taking into account low-level visual processes in the study of motivated associations.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:23:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 IzabelCristinaViola.pdf: 5167096 bytes, checksum: 5ae574c694e79ab10fe91f2c4a099ac9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-05-12 / This thesis elucidates the elements that build the relationship between sound and meaning in speech and contributes theoretically and methodologically to the analysis of the oral expression. The symbolism of sounds, the style and the expression of emotions and attitudes are discussed from the point of view of speech. The models of communication The Live Voice and Covariance and Configuration help interpret the expressive potential of the speech. The corpus is constituted by the poem I-Juca Pirama performed by a professional actor. The data analysis dwells upon its auditive-perceptive and acoustic-phonetic analysis together with the parallelism between phonic materialization and the meaning. The qualitative analysis deals with the study the qualities of voice, the allophones of /r/ and the loudness. The measurement of the duration of speech segments, in ms, was carried out in order to analyse speech and articulation rates, rhythm and continuity. Furthermore, fundamental frequency values, in Hz, of vowel segments in words and phrases were obtained to investigate intonation aspects. The confrontation of duration and f0 contours are used to interpret the data of the prosodic analysis. We favor the conception that the relationship between sound and meaning in speech is either motivated or arbitrary, used consciously or unconsciously, historically established or continuously changed within culture, by the demotivation or remotivation processes of the sign. The individual promotes in practical activities the indexes of the nature of gestures, known as vocal gestures, which are composed by the interaction (and impossible dissociation) of prosodic elements (quality and dynamics of voice) with the phonetic elements (vowels and consonants) and non-verbal sounds produced in the communication (breathing, mouth and tongue sounds). As body movements of one or more structures of the vocal tract that move through time and space, in synchronic or non-synchronic ways, the vocal gestures are used to reduce tension being or not the voluntary reproduction an emotion or mark the presence of an emotion. The vocal gestures, as symbolic elements, belong to the system of expressive signs that respond to a universal sound symbolism. They can represent other animate or inanimate objects that are either associated by similarity or by functional analogy, may have a specific configuration and/or are subject to the activation of the organism when express linguistic information or an emotion or an attitude. The vocal gestures, as stylistical facts, represent the dual character of the language. They are practical trademarks of the job of the locutor who shows his/her singularity and subjectivity in a recurrent and salient way in the speech, building and being built by meaning, one time playing the main role, other times a secondary role. The vocal gestures, as physiologic and dynamic linguistic elements carry out in the individual expression the subjective and contextual demands that reflect in the variability of language and, therefore, integrate the voice into the universe of the language / Esta tese tem como objetivo enfocar os elementos que constroem as relações entre som e sentido na fala, contribuindo teórica e metodologicamente para a análise da expressividade oral. O simbolismo sonoro, o estilo e a expressão de emoções e atitudes são discutidos do ponto de vista da fala. Os modelos de comunicação A Viva Voz e da Covariância e da Configuração apóiam a interpretação do potencial expressivo da fala. O corpus é constituído pelo poema de I-Juca Pirama , interpretado por um ator profissional, e a análise dos dados é realizada por uma combinação das análises perceptivo-auditiva e fonético-acústica e pelo pareamento entre materialidade fônica e o sentido. As análises qualitativas abarcam o estudo das qualidades de voz, dos alofones do /r/, da loudness e de seus usos expressivos. As análises quantitativas abrangem as medidas de duração em ms em segmentos, sílabas, GIPC, silêncios, ruídos inspiratórios e enunciados e medidas de freqüência fundamental (f0) das vogais em palavras e enunciados. São analisados aspectos rítmicos, entoacionais, de continuidade e de taxa de elocução e articulação. A confrontação de contornos de duração e f0 é utilizada para a interpretação dos dados da análise prosódica. Pautamo-nos pela concepção de que o vínculo entre som e sentido na fala é de natureza motivada ou arbitrária, usado de forma consciente ou inconsciente, estabelecido historicamente e modificado constantemente na cultura, pelos processos de desmotivação e remotivação do signo. O indivíduo suscita na atividade prática os índices de caráter gestual, denominados de gestos vocais, que são compostos pela interação (e impossível dissociação) dos elementos prosódicos (qualidade e dinâmica da voz) com os segmentos fonéticos (vogais e consoantes) e sons não verbais produzidos na comunicação (ruídos respiratórios, sons bucais e linguais). Enquanto movimentos corporais, de uma ou mais estruturas do trato vocal que se deslocam no tempo e no espaço, de forma sincrônica ou não, os gestos vocais são utilizados para reduzir imediatamente a tensão e podem ser a reprodução voluntária ou assinalar a presença de uma emoção. Enquanto elementos simbólicos, os gestos vocais pertencem ao sistema total de signos expressivos que respondem a um simbolismo sonoro universal, podendo representar outros objetos animados ou inanimados que lhes são associados pela semelhança ou por uma analogia funcional, e podem assumir uma determinada configuração e/ou estão sujeitos à ativação do organismo, ao veicular uma informação lingüística ou uma emoção ou atitude. Os gestos vocais, enquanto fatos estilísticos, são representantes da dialogia da língua e são uma marca prática do trabalho do locutor, que exibe sua singularidade e sua subjetividade, de forma recorrente e saliente no discurso, construindo e sendo constituídos pelo sentido, ora no papel principal ora como coadjuvante. Os gestos vocais são os elementos fisiológicos e lingüísticos dinâmicos que efetivam na expressão do indivíduo as demandas contextuais e subjetivas que refletem a variabilidade da língua e, por isso, integram a voz no universo da linguagem

In this thesis, the usage of iconic expressions, or sound symbolic expressions, is investigated in Swedish child-directed speech during the first two years of life. Furthermore, it is explored whether there is an effect of the usage of sound symbolism on productive vocabulary at 2;0 years. Ten monolingual Swedish and typically-developing children and their parents were selected at the ages of 0;3, 0;6, 0;9, 1;0, 1;3, 1;6, 1;9 and 2;0 years. The sound symbolic expressions were extracted, classified and analysed. One finding is that sound symbolic expressions are used by all parents in varying degrees from sparsely to abundantly. On average 0,9 sound symbolic expressions were used per minute by all parents. There was no significant effect of the usage of sound symbolism on productive vocabulary. Nevertheless, this work shows that iconicity is used in early childhood and might be a part of the register child-directed speech. Further studies should investigate more thoroughly the effect of iconicity on language acquisition. / I denna studie undersöktes ikoniska, eller ljudsymboliska, uttryck i svenskt barnrikat tal under barnets första två levnadsår. Utöver detta testades det om det fanns någon effekt av användning av ljudsymbolik på barnets produktiva ordförråd vid 2;0 år. Tio enspråkiga svenska och typiskt-utvecklade barn och deras föräldrar valdes ut vid 0;3, 0;6, 0;9, 1;0, 1;3, 1;6, 1;9 och 2;0 år och de ljudsymboliska uttrycken extraherades, klassificerades och analyserades. Ett resultat var att alla föräldrar använde sig av ljudsymboliska uttryck; varierande från lite till mycket. I genomsnitt användes det 0,9 ljudsymboliska uttryck per minut av alla föräldrarna. Ingen signifikant effekt på det produktiva ordförrådet kunde hittas. Trots detta så visar detta arbete att ikonicitet används under den tidiga barndomen och att ikonicitet kanske är en del av talstilen ‘barnriktat tal’. Framtida forskning kan undersöka ikonicitetens påverkan på språkinlärning mer ingående. / Modelling infant language acquisition from parent-child interaction (MINT)