What is that cuteness doing to my sound symbolism effect?

On the interaction of cuteness and size-sound symbolism

Adapted from the ICLC2023 talk

"Cuteness amplifies effects of size sound symbolism: A cute /i/ is smaller than an ugly one"

by Dominic Schmitz, Defne Cicek, Anh Kim Nguyen & Daniel Rottleb

Talk by Anh Kim Nguyen

Sound symbolism:

  • A specific form of cross-modal correspondence
    • Meaning mapping directly to sounds

Obligatory definition slide

Arbitrariness of speech sounds

-De Saussure 1916

Köhler (1929),

Ramachandran and
Hubbard (2001)

Takete and Maluma,
Kiki and Bouba

sus

Obligatory definition slide

Established / discovered sound symbolism effects so far:

  • shape (round - pointy)

  • size (big - small)
  • strength (strong - weak)
  • pleasantness (friendly, soft - unfriendly, harsh)
  • etc

(Ahlner & Zlatev 2010; Bremner et al. 2013; Ćwiek et al. 2022; D’Onofrio 2013; Kawahara & Shinohara 2012; Kö hler 1929; Maurer, Pathman & Mondloch 2006; Nielsen & Rendall 2013; Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001; Westbury et al. 2018)

(Berlin 1995; Berlin 2006; Blasi et al. 2016; Johansson 2017; Erben Johansson et al. 2020;  Newman 1933; Shinohara & Kawahara 2010; Thompson & Estes 2011; Westbury et al. 2018; Newman, 1933;  Kawahara and Shinohara, 2012)

Kumagai 2020; Klink 2000; Kilpatrick et al. 2023; Uno et al. 2020

Köhler (1929),

Ramachandran and
Hubbard (2001)

Takete and Maluma,
Kiki and Bouba

  • Make up a word that reflects the traits SMALL and ROUND

 

 

 

  • Which trait weighs in more?
  • How do different sounds influence your perception of the object? Is bouba rounder than bibi?

What is the problem here?

BOUBA

bibi?

Do size and cuteness associations interact?

– Our Research Question (pre Reviewer 1 feedback)

Experiment!!!

Size ratings of pseudowords

1

Forced Choice Task

cuteness ratings for alien creatures :-)

2

Judgement Task

Age and language

3

Demographics questionaire

124 participants (mostly German), 92 pseudowords, 81 visual stimuli, let's goooo

Forced Choice Task

  • 81 pictures of friendly alien creachers
  • 92 pseudowords based on German phonotactics
  • pseudoword recordings were randomly matched with aliens
  • Participants rated the size of the psudo words
C1 V1 C2 V2
d, f, j, k, ʁ aː, ɛː, eː, iː, oː, øː, uː, yː d, f, j, k, ʁ aː, ɛː, eː, iː, oː, øː, uː, yː

van de Vijver &
Baer-Henney (2014)

Judgement Task

For all 81 aliens, our participants loved this part

DATA ANALYSIS 1 (ordinal regression model)

Significant effects:

  • Size ~ Vowel quality (successful replication of previous experiments)

Not significant effects:

  • Size ~ cuteness (🥺)
  • Size ~ consonant

"What was correlated with size?"

DATA ANALYSIS 2
(ordinal regression model, but Size ~ Vowel + Cuteness)

  • size increases and decreases with cuteness!
     
  • Cuteness seems to amplify the perceived sound symbolic size effects
     
  • Cute ≠ Small

"And what about size AND cuteness together?"

Cuteness modulates size sound symbolism at its extremes

– The title of our paper, but also the answer to our research question

  • here's an educated guess:
     
  • it's an established effect
    • difficult to pinpoint, but humans know when they are looking at something cute
  • linked to body and limb shape, head and eye size in relation to body, high frequency noises etc
  • small+cute = babies are small, high voice?
  • big+cute = clumsy body, plump, big head?

Ok, but why?

✨Infant Schema✨

(Lorenz 1943)

  • Our findings imply that future sound symbolism research should be careful with rating the strength of effects
    • Even when size ratings alone were measured, it seems that the cuteness of the image was interacting with participants' perception of the aliens' sizes

We just made everyone's lives worse, because now everyone has to double check things for mixed effects

What does that mean?

Thank You!

You may now take me apart with questions.

SLaM Lab
@HHU

 

Diversität der Linguistik e.V.

  • Ahlner, Felix & Jordan Zlatev. 2010. Cross-modal iconicity: A cognitive semiotic approach to sound symbolism. Sign Systems Studies 38(1/4). 298–348. doi: 10.12697/SSS.2010.38.1-4.11.

  • Berlin, Brent. 2006. The First Congress of Ethnozoological Nomenclature. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12(s1). 23– 44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00271.x.

  • Blasi, Damián E., Søren Wichmann, Harald Hammarström, Peter F. Stadler & Morten H. Christiansen. 2016. Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113(39). 10818–10823. https://doi.org/10.1073/PNAS.1605782113.

  • Bremner, Andrew J., Serge Caparos, Jules Davidoff, Jan de Fockert, Karina J. Linnell & Charles Spence. 2013. “Bouba” and “Kiki” in Namibia? A remote culture make shape–sound matches, but different shape–taste matches to Westerners. Cognition 126(2). 165–172. doi: 10.1016/J.COGNITION.2012.09.007.

  • Ćwiek, Aleksandra, Susanne Fuchs, Christoph Draxler, Eva Liina Asu, Dan Dediu, Katri Hiovain, Shigeto Kawahara, et al. 2022. The bouba/kiki effectis robust across cultures and writing systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377(1841). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0390.

  • Johansson, Niklas. 2017. Tracking linguistic primitives. In Angelika Zirker, Matthias Bauer, Olga Fischer & Christina Ljungberg (eds.), Dimensions of iconicity, 39–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.15.03joh.

  • Kawahara, Shigeto & Kazuko Shinohara. 2012. A tripartite trans-modal relationship among sounds, shapes and emotions: A case of abrupt modulation. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [7]

  • Köhler, Wolfgang. 1929. Gestalt psychology. New York: Liveright.

  • Kringelbach, Morten L., Eloise A. Stark, Catherine Alexander, Marc H. Bornstein & Alan Stein. 2016. On cuteness: Unlocking the parental brain and beyond. Trendsin Cognitive Sciences 20(7). 545–558. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.05.003.

  • Lehmann, Vicky, Elisabeth M.J. Huis in‘t Veld & Ad J.J.M. Vingerhoets. 2013. The human and animal baby schema effect: Correlates of individual differences. Behavioural Processes 94. 99–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2013.01.001.

  • Maurer, Daphne, Thanujeni Pathman & Catherine J. Mondloch. 2006. The shape of boubas: Sound–shape correspondences in toddlers and adults. Developmental Science 9(3). 316–322. doi: 10.1111/J.1467-7687.2006.00495.X.

  • Nielsen, Alan K.S. & Drew Rendall. 2013. Parsing the role of consonants versus vowels in the classic Takete-Maluma phenomenon. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 67(2). 153–163. doi: 10.1037/A0030553

  • Ramachandran, V. & E. Hubbard. 2001. Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(12).

  • Shinohara, Kazuko & Shigeto Kawahara. 2010. A cross-linguistic study of sound symbolism: The images of size. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 36(1). 396–410. doi: 10.3765/BLS.V36I1.3926.

  • Vijver, Ruben van de & Dinah Baer-Henney. 2014. Developing biases. Frontiers in Psychology 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00634.

  • Westbury, Chris, Geoff Hollis, David M. Sidhu & Penny M. Pexman. 2018. Weighing up the evidence for sound symbolism: Distributional properties predict cue strength. Journal of Memory and Language 122–150. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JML.2017.09.006.

Bibliography

I hope these are all

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Or contact me via mail: anngu104@hhu.de

Slides are up and can be downloaded from the schedule!

Link to the paper is also in the schedule!

FAQ of things I'm guessing you might be asking me

Q: Were the alien images specifically made to test infant schema effects?

A: No, this experiment was exploratory and we used images at hand. Future replications should definitely use images which control for things such as size of head, size of eyes etc.

 

Q: You said participants were mostly German?

A: Out of 124 people, 109 were German to be exact. Since there were so little speakers from other languages, we had to exclude L1 and L2 as a possible effect on anything :(

FAQ of things I'm guessing you might be asking me

Q: I need to know the alien which was rated cutest

A:

 

 

 


 

FAQ of things I'm guessing you might be asking me

Q: Did you test other predictors than vowel, consonant and cuteness?

A: Yes, the full formula for our regression model was:

size ~
C1 +
C2 +
vowel +
s(cuteness, bs = "tp", by = vowel, k = 5) +
s(cuteness, bs = "tp", by = C1, k = 5) +
s(cuteness, bs = "tp", by = C2, k = 5) +
s(cuteness, k = 5) +
s(pnd, k = 7) +
s(age, bs = "re") +
s(L1, bs = "re") +
s(L2, bs = "re") +
s(item, bs = "re") +
s(participant, bs = "re"