Sound symbolic associations in Spanish emotional words: affective dimensions and discrete emotions

ABSTRACT

Sound symbolism refers to non-arbitrary associations between word forms and meaning, such as those observed for some properties of sounds and size or shape. Recent evidence suggests that these connections extend to emotional concepts. Here we investigated two types of non-arbitrary relationships. Study 1 examined whether iconicity scores (i.e. resemblance-based mapping between aspects of a word’s form and its meaning) for words can be predicted from ratings in the affective dimensions of valence and arousal and/or the discrete emotions of happiness, anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Words denoting negative concepts were more likely to have more iconic word forms. Study 2 explored whether statistical regularities in single phonemes (i.e. systematicity) predicted ratings in affective dimensions and/or discrete emotions. Voiceless (/p/, /t/) and voiced plosives (/b/, /d/, /g/) were related to high arousing words, whereas high arousing negative words tended to include fricatives (/s/, /z/). Hissing consonants were also more likely to occur in words denoting all negative discrete emotions. Additionally, words conveying certain discrete emotions included specific phonemes. Overall, our data suggest that emotional features might explain variations in iconicity and provide new insight about phonemic patterns showing sound symbolic associations with the affective properties of words.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• sound symbolism
• iconicity
• affective dimensions
• discrete emotions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open practices statement

Data and the scripts for the analyses would be made available upon request.

Notes

1 Introducing the centered variables did not modify the model. Happiness, sadness and anger showed correlations higher than 0.70 with valence. The introduction of these variables in the model also shown VIF values greater than 5 and Tolerance values below 0.2, which indicate multicollinearity.

2 Some authors have found non-arbitrary associations between form and arousal based on analyses that emphasized the bipolar nature of this emotional dimension (see Schmidtke et al., 2014, for a debate about the unidimensional vs bipolar nature of arousal). To explore this possibility, we ran some additional analyses. We first transformed scores in the 1-to-9 arousal dimension into a bipolar scale ranging from -4 to +4. Subsequently, the absolute values were used to predict iconicity. We failed to observe significant effects for arousal (p = .325) while valence remained a significant predictor of iconicity (p = .001).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain under [Grants numbers: PID2021-125842NB-I00; 107206GB-I00 /AEI/10.13039/501100011033]; and Universitat Rovira i Virgili under [Grant number: 2022PFR-URV-47]. The first author is beneficiary of the predoctoral contract number FPU19/01175 from the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades of Spain.