Despite the arbitrariness assumption, increasing evidence suggests that sound symbolism, or non-arbitrary correspondences between sound and meaning, exists in natural language. Many have argued that this arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning affords language much of its referential power (Gasser, 2004 Monaghan & Christiansen, 2006). The relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning has traditionally been assumed to be arbitrary such that the sounds that comprise a spoken word do not reflect the properties of the word's referent (Hockett, 1977 Newmeyer, 1993 Saussure, 1959). These findings suggest that although sound symbolic properties generalize to meanings that may share overlapping semantic features, sound symbolic mappings offer semantic specificity. Listeners agreed more reliably on the English translation for matched relative to mismatched dimensions, though reliable cross-dimensional mappings did occur. In three experiments, native English-speaking adults heard sound symbolic foreign words for dimensional adjective pairs (big/small, round/pointy, fast/slow, moving/still) and for each foreign word, selected a translation among English antonyms that either matched or mismatched with the correct meaning dimension. This study investigated whether sound symbolic properties correspond to specific meanings, or whether these properties generalize across semantic dimensions. However, little is known about the specificity of these mappings.
Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, sound symbolism, or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language.
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