Evolution of Language: nonsense word meanings (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 14:23 (893 days ago) @ David Turell

A study across many languages:

https://www.science.org/content/article/nonsense-words-make-people-around-world-think-s...

"Now, the most extensive study of this finding yet—testing 917 speakers of 25 languages that use 10 different writing systems—has found that 72% of participants across languages associate the word “bouba” with a blobby shape and “kiki” with a sharp one.

"Such “cross-sensory” links—here, between speech and vision—show people can use nonsense words and other vocal noises to evoke concepts without using actual language. That could help explain how language evolved in the first place, says Aleksandra Ćwiek, a linguistics doctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics who led the new study.

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"Past research has pointed to the spikiness of the letter K, and roundness of the letter B, as the primary reason for the effect of “kiki” and “bouba” on English speakers. But other work has found that children who haven’t yet learned to read also make the association, as do Himba people in Namibia, who have limited contact with Westerners and don’t use written language.

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"The volunteers overwhelmingly matched “bouba” with the round shape and “kiki” with the spiky one, the authors report today in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The finding suggests people make a genuine link between the sounds and the shape. It also adds to a growing pile of evidence that challenges an old linguistic dogma: the belief that the sounds that make up a word have no relationship to its meaning.

"But there were important differences across languages. Whereas 75% of speakers whose languages use the Roman alphabet—including English and other European languages—made the link, only 63% of speakers of other languages such as Georgian and Japanese did. And three languages—Romanian, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese—didn’t show the effect at all.

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"Some evolutionary linguists have suggested language may have started not with speech, but with gesture, because it’s so much easier to illustrate an idea with hands—like miming the shape of a tree, Ćwiek says. But that explanation just raises a new question: Why did speech emerge at all? The growing evidence that vocal noises can also evoke ideas like shape or size helps close that gap, she says, hinting that both gesture and speech “have played a significant role at the very core of language.”

Comment: An interesting approach as how language began.