Synesthesia and the origins of language

Do sounds have meaning?

Obviously, words do. But that's not what I'm talking about. Instead, think about the sounds that make up words. When the word was coined, were the sounds chosen because those sounds already made people think of the concept being described?

That's a difficult theory to prove, but there's been some research that supports it. New Scientist has a really fascinating article up about the studies that suggest the sounds in our words aren't totally random. Instead, we all might associate sounds with other senses to some degree. If that sounds a lot like synesthesia ... well, that's the point. The idea behind this theory is that, as with many neurological phenomena, synesthesia exists on a continuum. A true synesthete might hear the word "table" and think of it as a color, or associate it with a smell. But most of us, if given the choice between two unfamiliar words, can tell which one means pointy at rate better than chance.

Suspecting that sound symbolism might also help adults to understand a foreign tongue, Lynne Nygaard at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, recently presented English speakers with pairs of antonyms (such as fast/slow) recorded in 10 different languages - including Albanian, Dutch, Gujarati, Mandarin and Yoruba. When given the corresponding pair of English words, and asked to match the foreign words to them, subjects performed better than they would by chance - suggesting the words' sounds must give clues to their meaning.

What could these clues be? A subsequent analysis hinted at some answers. Words that indicate general movement tend to have more vowels, for instance, and they are more likely to have glottal consonants (the "h" in "behind", for example). Sounds might also reflect the speed of movement: slow movement tends to be represented by sonorant sounds such as "l" or "w", whereas explosive obstruents produced from a blocked airway, such as "ch" or "f", are suggestive of more rapid speeds. Nygaard presented her work at the Atlanta workshop.

Bringing all the evidence together, there seems to be a strong case for saying that sound symbolism does occur in human language. However, some big questions remain. How common are words that elicit cross-sensory connections in modern languages? "Maybe they represent just small pockets of vocabulary," says Morten Christiansen at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.

Finally, is sound symbolism universal, perhaps even innate? Tests showing that the patterns are recognised by young children, and by people across cultures, suggest that is a possibility, but more work needs to be done before it can be taken for granted.

Via Stan Carey

Image: Pointy Iron Things, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from 22280677@N07's photostream

• [avraamov]

  something rarely addressed in writing on synaesthesia is materiality, or ‘object-hood’. kevin dann highlights this very well, when he says that a lot of synaesthetes describe the cross-modal correlations they experience as implicitly material – so for example a certain word might be ‘mouse brown’, or ‘grey like the colour of new rope’. invariably, morphology is only part of the picture…

  this makes more sense to me personally anyway. the word ‘wood’ might be rounded and soft, but to describe it as just that, to my mind, requires a deliberate stripping away of a whole composite of material associations (warm, fibrous, dusty, resonant, sweet smelling) to get to that point. the problem with ‘kiki’ and ‘booba’ idea is that it’s reductive to the point of denuding the speaker’s material associations with anything – only shape remains. if i think of ‘booba’ as being made of stainless steel, and ‘kiki’ made of felt, it reverses the name/shape combinations.

  what this article does deal with, which is more interesting, is how events in time might be synaesthetically dealt with (a large object rolling for example), which begins to get at how objects can be understood in totality, instead of just a couple of single attributes.

• [avraamov]

  oh yeah – dann’s book:

  http://www.amazon.com/Bright-Colors-Falsely-Seen-Transcendental/dp/0300066198/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311027970&sr=1-1

  it’s primarily a cultural history, which is important, since none of this stuff exists in a vacuum, neurology or not.

• [Anonymous]

  i agree with this theory, there are so many languages where the word for mom and pop are so similar (i’m thinking germanic, latin, and asian languages)… mom (english) mae (portuguese), eomma (korean)

• [Dave Rattigan]

  I had to roll my eyes at that yellow sign advertising “pointy iron things” for $3. Surely everyone knows pointyness is blue?

• [turn_self_off]

  I am reminded of a claim that computer scientists working on speech recognition was barking up the wrong tree. This because they focused on whole words rather then the individual sounds that made up the words.

• [Anonymous]

  Jeff Hawkins theories and work at Numenta inform the interest in synesthesia .

  On Intelligence
  Copyright © 2004 by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee

  70
  four attributes of neocortical memory that are fundamentally different from computer memory:

  • The neocortex stores sequences of patterns
  • The neocortex recalls patterns auto-associatively
  • The neocortex stores patterns in an invariant form
  • The neocortex stores patterns in a hierarchy

  71
  Truly random thoughts don’t exist. Memory recall almost always follows a pathway of association.

  You know the alphabet. Try saying it backward. You can’t because you don’t usually experience it backward.

  80
  let’s return to the sensory cortex and look at music again. (I like music as an example because it is easy to see all the issues the neocortex must solve.) Invariant representation in music is illustrated by your ability to recognize a melody in any key.

  Think of the song “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” You probably can’t recall the key she sang it in (A flat). If I sit down at a piano and start to play the song in a key in which you’ve never heard it — say, in D — it will sound like the same song.

  The memory must store the important relationships in the song, not the actual notes. In this case, the important relationships are the relative pitch if the notes, or “intervals.” “Somewhere over the Rainbow” begins with an octave up. followed by a halftone down, followed by a major third down, and so on.

• [Anonymous]

  Speaking as a grapheme-color synesthete, let me assure you, “table” does have a color. It’s pink.

• [petsounds]

  Maggie, a true synesthete doesn’t just think of color associations, they have no choice in the matter. Reading a poem can be like seeing Fantasia. Words that sound like concepts is completely different. Maybe instinctual memory passed down through generations of language, or just a slow procession of languages. Interesting to think about, but not at all like synesthesia.

• [airshowfan]

  I, for one, would be interested in whether the word pairs were chosen as randomly/broadly as the people who were interviewed and the non-English languages they speak.

  I mean, it’s easy to come up with words like “fast/slow” that have some synesthetic “kiki/buba” to them… but are MOST pairs of antonyms like that, or just a FEW? A good study along these lines would use many many pairs of antonyms, from all over the dictionary, ideally from many languages. While some (like “fast/slow”) would show better-than-chance associativity with their meanings, many others (say; “big/small”) might show zero correlation (or negative correlation) between their true meanings and the typical guess by a non-English-speaker about which one means which.

  Ok, I’ll go read the article now.

• [Zadaz]

  To me it just sounds lie onomatopoeia and not synesthesia at all.

  Or maybe I’m just not much of a synesthete.

  • [akwhitacre]

    Yeah, glad you mentioned that too. Even in the New Scientist article, it doesn’t sound like synesthesia at all. It’s not enough to have a mental association between, say, a sound and a color…hearing the sound would have to cause the *sensation* of seeing the color.

• [show me]

  Or, it could be that the words share a common root word in a roundabout way so that the words sound similar; not in all cases, obviously, but enough to be “better than chance.”

  • [Anonymous]

    ” Albanian, Dutch, Gujarati, Mandarin and Yoruba”? And English? The words don’t share a common root. Not all of them, anyway.

    • [Shelby]

      Not only do these languages not all share a common root, but some of them are based a lot on the tones of words, especially Dutch and Mandarin. There are a lot of words spelled the same and with the same sounds, but the tones are different. Couldn’t that affect the study?

• [Anonymous]

  For a lighter take on this: http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2011/06/masterchef-synesthesia.html

• [Nawel]

  This could be a interesting development in linguistics.

• [Nadreck]

  Things to think about when designing the new Alien or Magical language for your next novel!

• [lilomar]

  Anyone else want to buy some pointy iron things?

  They appear to all be wrought-iron fence toppers, I was kinda hoping, after I saw the sign, that there would be a plethora of objects, all iron and pointy, but otherwise dissimilar.

• [Neon Tooth]

  The sign maker will never see this, but they’re called “finials”.

  • [Teller]

    Correct. Oddly, my security staff told my live-in staff I’m missing about six on the south fence.

• [Jasonclock]

  Not sure if this is super relevant to the topic, but a while back I ‘tested’ some friends by having them listen to a sine wave and a sawtooth wave (not telling them what they were called, not showing them what they look like), and asking them to describe them. Often the sinewave was described as sounding ‘smooth’ or ’round’, while the sawtooth wave was described as sounding ‘sharp’. I just found it interesting that that’s exactly what they LOOK LIKE too, making me think that on some level, maybe we subconsciously perceive the shape of the actual waveforms in the sounds we hear…?

• [Anonymous]

  “English speakers with pairs of antonyms (such as fast/slow) recorded in 10 different languages – including Albanian, Dutch, …” how could they screen against cognates, even distant ones?

  One possible Albanian for ‘cold’ is: “të ftohtë”
  for ‘hot’ one word is: “nxehtë”

  i’m no student of languages but i recognize the frosty/’frío’ in the former and the ‘caliente’ in the latter; and without hearing either.

  • [Anonymous]

    I don’t see how you would read “caliente” in “nxehtë” (pronounced “nzet”, for the few non-Albanians out there).

• [Tristan Eldtritch]

  Fascinating, although I think i would tend to agree with zadaz: it’s natural that all language would contain a certain degree of imitative onomatopoeia, and this percentage could account for the better than chance scores, rather than positing a very mysterious universal sound symbolism.

• [Anonymous]

  Monty Python’s Tinny/Woody-sounding sketch
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg

• [KWillets]

  Try this:

  Which one is “hard”, which one is “soft”?

  http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&q=%EB%B6%80%EB%93%9C%EB%9F%AC%EC%9A%B4&tl=ko

  http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&q=%EB%8B%A8%EB%8B%A8%ED%95%9C&tl=ko

  (I flipped a coin to determine the order).

  Your browser may have trouble with link, but copying and pasting the url into the address bar seems to work.

  Post your examples!

• [senorglory]

  Perhaps syneshtesia explains why bilingual speakers reflexively mix their two languages, or why foreign words get universally adopted (“loanwords” per quick wikipedia search).

  “Mosquito.” hmmm. Sounds right to me.

• [bardfinn]

  Synaesthesia is any sense crossing over to any other sense. If you see a sharp thing and your brain prompts you to make a particular noise, and the sane thing prompts someone else to make a similar noise, that’s synaesthesia. The remarkable things that most people call synaesthesia is seeing additional information superimposed on other things one sees, or hearing something from something one tastes.

  • [Anonymous]

    @bardfinn you’re missing the point. You said so yourself, synaesthesia is the crossing over of one sense with another. Since when is producing a sound a sense? It is not, it is motor pattern production. When some musicians hear music, they move their fingers as if they are playing it, this is not synaesthesia, its simply association.

    The nuance is the entire matter.

    This is not synaestehsia

• [Marja]

  English and Dutch?

  So how does that study fare when we skip the languages closely-related to English?

• [Tdawwg]

  They don’t address the issue that we don’t hear sounds ab ovo, like the hypothetical first-ever users or coiners of a word presumably would have. Kiki sounds spiky, possibly, because we have cultural associations with those phonemes: boubu the same, it sounds kind of smooth and rolly-polly to one, perhaps, because of other words and sensations that we’ve been taught by the culture to think of as smooth, and we map these ideas onto the unheard word.

  It would be great if they’d widen the sample field to synonyms for the same word within a language: if pointy iron thing, spike, wrought-iron fence toppers, and finial could all be shown to light up similar areas of the brain, and that these are congruent with synonymous terms in a number of languages, that might help to solidify the hypothesis. Or, we could get some fun Kaspar Hauser–type experiments going on in different countries!

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Kiki sounds spiky

    Are we on kiki again? Do I have to remind everyone that it’s Tagalog slang for ladyparts?

    • [Tdawwg]

      It was referenced in the article linked atop. I missed the kiki moratorium, I guess. No reminder necessary, as we’re both proficient at the Google Machine.

      As for the spiky ladyparts, cf. the well-known vagina dentata. And I recall reading about Chinese women placing razors “down there” during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, to prevent, or punish, would-be rapists. History and the imago mundi no doubt offer other examples.

    • [Tdawwg]

      I suggest citing this in the future.

      http://www.kikimag.com/

• [BubbaRich]

  I really like Hawkins’ ideas, though they are mostly a synthesis of previous ideas he wasn’t aware of when he wrote the book.

  There’s pretty substantial evidence that analogy in our brains was an important factor (possibly “the” important factor) that made us human, separated us from other great apes. Protohumans used stone tools for over 2 million years, including for killing and preparing animals meat and hides, before it occurred to us that the animals own bones were very available to us, and could be used for many of the same uses. And they could be used more easily and better than stones in many cases.

  This same analogy skill is what gives us the ability for language, where a sound can represent a thing, or even more importantly a _class_ of things. Like others above, I think “synaesthesia” is too strong a way to put this, but it’s a good marketing hook to popularize the idea. Unless it’s so strong that people will say “but it’s not really like that at all!”