{"pk":21669,"title":"Sound Symbolism Across Diverse Writing Systems","subtitle":null,"abstract":"It is now well-established that the visual features of objects influence the sounds we make to refer to them. This is called sound symbolism. We present the results of a two-part study that explores the extent to which the visual features of writing systems correspond to the smallest spoken units of language. In Study 1, participants (n = 322) classified the shape of a set of glyphs, representative of the world's script families. The purpose was to create an open-source database of normed glyphs for future research in cognitive linguistics. In Study 2, participants (n = 73) were prompted to select either a round or angular glyph after hearing one of two kinds of phonemes (vowel or consonant) from the International Phonetic Alphabet. Results from a logistic regression suggest that the type of sound had a significant effect on the choice of glyph, and that vowel sounds increased the likelihood of choosing round glyphs by 30%. The significant correlation between what subjects heard and their choice of glyph suggests that the effect may extend to such sound symbolic relations in real-world writing systems. Our ongoing research seeks to substantiate these findings with increased glyph contrast and more diverse populations.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Psychology; Language and thought; Language understanding"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xc6659p","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Alexander","middle_name":"","last_name":"Porto","name_suffix":"","institution":"Duquesne University","department":""},{"first_name":"Alexander","middle_name":"","last_name":"Basalyga","name_suffix":"","institution":"Independent Researcher","department":""},{"first_name":"Mr. Nikolai","middle_name":"","last_name":"Huckle","name_suffix":"","institution":"SCHUFA Holding AG","department":""},{"first_name":"Julio","middle_name":"","last_name":"Santiago","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Granada","department":""},{"first_name":"Elizabeth","middle_name":"","last_name":"Fein","name_suffix":"","institution":"Duquesne University","department":""},{"first_name":"Alexander","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kranjec","name_suffix":"","institution":"Duquesne University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21669/galley/11268/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21669/galley/14577/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21669/galley/22045/download/"}]}