Abstract
Sound-symbolic patterns which relate to the perception of size were found to motivate the behavior of English and Japanese speakers in the naming of pre- and post-evolution Pokémon. The current study builds from this finding and investigates which sound-symbolic association speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) employ to name Pokémon characters. Results from 3 experiments show that vowel quality, phonological length and voiced obstruents, usually used to signal differences in size, are used to signal differences in evolution; however, the effects of voiced obstruents are not identical to what was previously observed in the behavior of Japanese speakers. We argue that although there is a universal sound symbolism associated with these sounds and the perception of largeness, its manifestation differs cross-linguistically. To the best of our knowledge, this is one the first experimental research to investigate sound symbolism and the perception of size in BP.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Starr et al. (2018) did not report any finding for these variables.
When a Pokémon undergoes evolution, size is not the only change it experiences: it becomes stronger, faster, and sometimes its looks becomes more aggressive (see Fig. 1). Of all these changing features, size is the one that can be visually perceived and can clearly show that two related Pokémon are the pre and post-evolution version of the same character. In our study, we made this difference even more striking by making the pictures of post-evolution Pokémon characters larger (“Materials and Procedures” section). For this reason, we take any effect that shows a correlation between sound and evolutionary status to be at least partially grounded on the size of these characters.
https://t0t0mo.jimdo.com/. The pictures were used in the experiment with the permission of the artist.
Our referees for the first experiment were the second and the fourth co-author of this paper, and an undergraduate student at the UFRN English Language program.
As we mentioned, these studies are independent and differ in their methodology. The corpus for the study in Japanese was comprised of texts published in newspapers, while the study in BP used a dictionary. We use their results here to present an estimative of frequency for the voiced obstruents in these languages, but a thorough investigation of this issue would require a new and more balanced cross-linguistic corpus study.
References
Aryani, A., Jacobs, A. M., & Conrad, M. (2013). Extracting salient sublexical units from written texts: “Emophon”, a corpus-based approach to phonological iconicity. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00654.
Asano, M., & Yokosawa, K. (2011). Synesthetic colors are elicited by sound quality in Japanese synesthetes. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1816–1823. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2011.05.012.
Benjamini, Y., & Hochberg, Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate: A practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), 57(1), 289–300. Retrieved from JSTOR.
Berlin, B. (2006). The first congress of ethnozoological nomenclature. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12(s1), S23–S44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00271.x.
Blasi, D. E., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., Stadler, P. F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2016). Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(39), 10818–10823. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1605782113.
Borgwaldt, S. R., Hellwig, F. M., & Groot, A. M. B. D. (2005). Onset entropy matters—letter-to-phoneme mappings in seven languages. Reading and Writing, 18(3), 211–229. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-005-3001-9.
Bremner, A. J., Caparos, S., Davidoff, J., de Fockert, J., Linnell, K. J., & Spence, C. (2013). “Bouba” and “Kiki” in Namibia? A remote culture make similar shape-sound matches, but different shape-taste matches to Westerners. Cognition, 126(2), 165–172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.09.007.
Coulter, K. S., & Coulter, R. A. (2010). Small sounds, big deals: Phonetic symbolism effects in pricing. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(2), 315–328. https://doi.org/10.1086/651241.
Cruz, R. C. F., & Fernandes, H. F. G. (2004). Simbolismo sonoro do PB: o estudo dos ideofones [Sound Symbolism in Brazilian Portuguese: a study of ideophones]. Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, 12(2), 439–458.
Cuskley, C. (2013). Mappings between linguistic sound and motion. Public Journal of Semiotics, 5(1), 39–62.
Daland, R., Hayes, B., White, J., Garellek, M., Davis, A., & Norrmann, I. (2011). Explaining sonority projection effects. Phonology, 28(2), 197–234. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675711000145.
Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D. E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, iconicity, and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(10), 603–615. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.07.013.
Dingemanse, M., Schuerman, W. L., Reinisch, E., Tufvesson, S., & Mitterer, H. (2016). What sound symbolism can and cannot do: Testing the iconicity of ideophones from five languages. Language, 92(2), e117–e133. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0034.
Dingemanse, M., Torreira, F., & Enfield, N. J. (2013). Is “Huh?” A universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items. PLoS ONE, 8(11), e78273. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078273.
Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R. H. (2003). Predicting the unpredictable: Interpreting neutralized segments in Dutch. Language, 71(1), 5–38. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2003.0076.
Fort, M., Martin, A., & Peperkamp, S. (2014). Consonants are more important than vowels in the bouba-kiki effect. Language and Speech, 58, 247–266. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830914534951.
Godoy, M., Duarte, A. C. V., da Silva, F. L. F., Albano, G. F., de Souza, R. J. P., & da Silva, Y U Ade P M. (2018). Replicando o efeito Takete-Maluma em Português Brasileiro. Revista do GELNE, 20(1), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.21680/1517-7874.2018v20n1ID13331.
Haiman, J. (1980). The iconicity of grammar: Isomorphism and motivation. Language, 56(3), 515–540. https://doi.org/10.2307/414448.
Haiman, J. (Ed.). (1985). Iconicity in syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hamano, S. (1988). The sound symbolic system of Japanese. Doctoral dissertation, University of Florida.
Hay, J., Pierrehumbert, J., & Beckman, M. (2003). Speech perception, well-formedness, and the statistics of the lexicon. In J. Local, R. Ogden, & R. Temple (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology VI: Phonetic interpretation (pp. 58–74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hirata, S., Ukita, J., & Kita, S. (2011). Implicit phonetic symbolism in voicing of consonants and visual lightness using Garner’s speeded classification task. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 113(3), 929–940. https://doi.org/10.2466/15.21.28.PMS.113.6.929-940.
Hollard, M., & Wertheimer, M. (1964). Some physiognomic aspects of naming, or maluma and takete revisited. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 19, 111–117.
Imai, M., & Kita, S. (2014). The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1651), 20130298. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0298.
Imai, M., Kita, S., Nagumo, M., & Okada, H. (2008). Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning. Cognition, 109(1), 54–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.015.
Iwasaki, N., Vinson, D. P., & Vigliocco, G. (2007a). How does it hurt, kiri-kiri or siku-siku? Japanese mimetic words of pain perceived by Japanese speakers and English speakers. In M. Minami (Ed.), Applying theory and research to learning Japanese as a foreign language (pp. 2–19).
Iwasaki, N., Vinson, D. P., & Vigliocco, G. (2007b). What do English speakers know about gera-gera and yotayota? A cross-linguistic investigation of mimetic words for laughing and walking. Sekai no nihongo kyoiku [Japanese Language Education Around the Globe], 17, 53–78.
Kavitskaya, D. (2018). On Russian Pokémonastics. Talk at the first Conference in Pokémonastics, May 2018, Keyo University: Japan.
Kawahara, S., & Kumagai, G. (2019). Expressing evolution in Pokémon names: Experimental explorations. Journal of Japanese Linguistics, 35(1), 3–38. https://doi.org/10.1515/jjl-2019-2002.
Kawahara, S., Noto, A., & Kumagai, G. (2018). Sound symbolic patterns in Pokémon names. Phonetica, 75(3), 219–244. https://doi.org/10.1159/000484938.
Kawahara, S., & Shinohara, K. (2011). Phonetic and psycholinguistic prominences in pun for- mation: Experimental evidence for positional faithfulness. In W. McClure & M. den Dikken (Eds.), Japanese/Korean linguistics (Vol. 18, pp. 177–188). Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Kawahara, S., Shinohara, K., & Grady, J. (2015). Iconic inferences about personality: From sounds and shapes. In M. Hiraga, W. Herlofsky, K. Shinohara, & K. Akita (Eds.), Iconicity: East meets west (pp. 57–69). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kawahara, S., Shinohara, K., & Uchimoto, Y. (2008). A positional effect in sound symbolism: An experimental study. In Proceedings of the Japan Cognitive Linguistics Association 8, pp. 417–427. JCLA, Tokyo.
Köhler, W. (1947). Gestalt psychology: An introduction to new concepts in modern psychology. New York, NY: Liveright.
Lockwood, G., & Dingemanse, M. (2015). Iconicity in the lab: A review of behavioral, developmental, and neuroimaging research into sound-symbolism. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1246. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01246.
Lockwood, G., Dingemanse, M., & Hagoort, P. (2016). Sound-symbolism boosts novel word learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(8), 1274–1281. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000235.
Madureira, S., & Camargo, Z. A. (2010) Exploring sound symbolism in the investigation of speech expressivity. In A. Botinis (Ed), ISCA, 2010, Athens. Athens, vol. 01. pp. 105–108.
Maglio, S. J., Rabaglia, C. D., Feder, M. A., Krehm, M., & Trope, Y. (2014). Vowel sounds in words affect mental construal and shift preferences for targets. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1082–1096. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035543.
Maurer, D., Pathman, T., & Mondloch, C. J. (2006). The shape of boubas: Sound-shape correspondences in toddlers and adults. Developmental Science, 9(3), 316–322. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2006.00495.x.
Moos, A., Smith, R., Miller, S. R., & Simmons, D. R. (2014). Cross-modal associations in synaesthesia: Vowel colours in the ear of the beholder. I-Perception, 5(2), 132–142. https://doi.org/10.1068/i0626.
Morton, E. S. (1994). Sound symbolism and its role in non-human vertebrate communication. In L. Hinton, J. Nichols, & J. Ohala (Eds.), Sound symbolism (pp. 348–365). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Newman, S. (1933). Further experiments on phonetic symbolism. American Journal of Psychology, 45, 53–75.
Nielsen, A. K. S., & Rendall, D. (2013). Parsing the role of consonants versus vowels in the classic Takete-Maluma phenomenon. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67(2), 153–163. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030553.
Nooteboom, S. (1981). Lexical retrieval from fragments of spoken words: Beginnings vs. endings. Journal of Phonetics, 9(4), 407–424.
Nygaard, L. C., Cook, A. E., & Namy, L. L. (2009). Sound to meaning correspondences facilitate word learning. Cognition, 112(1), 181–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.04.001.
Ohala, J. J. (1984). An ethological perspective on common cross-language utilization of F0 of voice. Phonetica, 41(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1159/000261706.
Ohala, J. J. (1994). The frequency code underlies the sound symbolic use of voice pitch. In L. Hinton, J. Nichols, & J. J. Ohala (Eds.), Sound Symbolism (pp. 325–347). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ohtake, Y., & Haryu, E. (2013). Investigation of the process underpinning vowel-size correspondence. Japanese Psychological Research, 55(4), 390–399. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpr.12029.
Otake, T., Hatano, G., Cutler, A., & Mehler, J. (1993). Mora or syllable? Speech segmentation in Japanese. Journal of Memory and Language, 32(2), 258–278. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1993.1014.
Oushiro, L. (2018). Transcritor fonológico do português [Portuguese phonological transcription tool]. Online version (v0.5.1). https://oushiro.shinyapps.io/silac. Access on April 2019.
Perfors, A. (2004). What’s in a name? The effect of sound symbolism on perception of facial attractiveness. In Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 26(26). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bq5v5c7.
Perlman, M., & Lupyan, G. (2018). People can create iconic vocalizations to communicate various meanings to naïve listeners. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-20961-6.
Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia—a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(12), 3–34.
Saji, N., Akita, K., Imai, M., Kantartzis, K., & Kita, S. (2013). Cross-linguistically shared and language-specific sound symbolism for motion: An exploratory data mining approach. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 35, 1253–1259.
Sapir, E. (1929). A study in phonetic symbolism. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225–239.
Shih, S. S., Ackerman, J., Hermalin, N., Inkelas, S., & Kavitskaya, D. (2018). Pokémonikers: A study of sound symbolism and Pokémon names. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 3(1), 42-1–6. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4335.
Shinohara, K., & Kawahara, S. (2010). A cross-linguistic study of sound symbolism: The images of size. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 36(1), 396–410. https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v36i1.3926.
Starr, R. L., Yu, A. C. L., & Shih, S. S. (2018). Sound symbolic effects in Mandarin and Cantonese personal names and Pokémon names. Talk at the first conference in Pokémonastics, May 2018, Keyo University: Japan.
Styles, S. J., & Gawne, L. (2017). When does Maluma/Takete fail? Two key failures and a meta-analysis suggest that phonology and phonotactics matter. I-Perception, 8(4), 2041669517724807. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669517724807.
Tamaoka, K., & Makioka, S. (2004). Frequency of occurrence for units of phonemes, morae, and syllables appearing in a lexical corpus of a Japanese newspaper. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36(3), 531–547. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195600.
Tzeng, C. Y., Nygaard, L. C., & Namy, L. L. (2017). The specificity of sound symbolic correspondences in spoken language. Cognitive Science, 41(8), 2191–2220. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12474.
Viaro, M. E., & Guimarães-Filho, Z. O. (2007). Análise quantitativa da frequência dos fonemas e estruturas silábicas portuguesas [Frequency quantitative analysis of phonemes and syllabic structures in Portuguese]. Estudos Linguísticos, 36(1), 27–36.
Westbury, C. (2005). Implicit sound symbolism in lexical access: Evidence from an interference task. Brain and Language, 93(1), 10–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2004.07.006.
Wiseman, M., & van Peer, W. (2003). Roman Jakobsons Konzept der Selbstreferenz aus der Perspektive der heutigen Kognitionswissenschaft [Roman Jakobson’s concept of self-reference from the perspective of present-day cognition studies]. In H. Birus, S. Donat, & B. Meyer-Sickendiek (Eds.), Roman Jakobsons Gedichtanalysen. Eine Herausforderung an die Philologien (pp. 277–306). Göttingen: Wallstein.
Wright, S. K., Hay, J., & Bent, T. (2005). Ladies first? Phonology, frequency, and the naming conspiracy. Linguistics, 43(3), 531–561. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2005.43.3.531.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Matheus Mafra for his work on the first and second experiments described in this paper. We are also grateful to Ms. toto-mame for allowing us to use her pictures for the current experiments. This project is partially supported by the JSPS grant #17K13448.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendices
Appendix A: Names for Experiment 2
Condition 1 | Names expected for pre-evolution Pokémons | Names expected for post-evolution Pokémons |
|---|---|---|
Pair 1 | Rituto | Talusso |
Pair 2 | Rissuke | Namusse |
Pair 3 | Ticero | Natecho |
Pair 4 | Sifupe | Kacupe |
Pair 5 | Mirtelo | Nanseno |
Pair 6 | Sikelo | Katerro |
Pair 7 | Picro | Faplo |
Pair 8 | Rinco | Sampo |
Pair 9 | Nito | Lapo |
Pair 10 | Tinclo | Fantro |
Condition 2 | Names expected for pre-evolution Pokémons | Names expected for post-evolution Pokémons |
|---|---|---|
Pair 1 | Tinke | Pincepe |
Pair 2 | Pumo | Ruchelo |
Pair 3 | Paina | Laipefa |
Pair 4 | Nutax | Tuncecax |
Pair 5 | Rimpo | Nilnurro |
Pair 6 | Kampa | Kalsena |
Pair 7 | Mape | Latuste |
Pair 8 | Upex | Ulepex |
Pair 9 | Oma | Onura |
Pair 10 | Nifom | Rirechom |
Condition 3 | Names expected for pre-evolution Pokémons | Names expected for post-evolution Pokémons |
|---|---|---|
Pair 1 | Rilata | Dilapa |
Pair 2 | Miupessa | Ziutefa |
Pair 3 | Ruakel | Juachel |
Pair 4 | Lilnonox | Giscomox |
Pair 5 | Kofole | Gotoke |
Pair 6 | Crepifo | Dressimo |
Pair 7 | Fessuta | Denuna |
Pair 8 | Foama | Zoana |
Pair 9 | Sossepra | Domecra |
Pair 10 | Lompoco | Gostoro |
Condition 4 | Names expected for pre-evolution Pokémons | Names expected for post-evolution Pokémons |
|---|---|---|
Pair 1 | Pumpocla | Durzocla |
Pair 2 | Fripoma | Dribopa |
Pair 3 | Noporam | Bovomam |
Pair 4 | Secara | Vejacha |
Pair 5 | Namila | Babirra |
Pair 6 | Cenice | Bessize |
Pair 7 | Xitefar | Gimevar |
Pair 8 | Trapena | Graceba |
Pair 9 | Furofo | Dupojo |
Pair 10 | Flofesse | Glossebe |
Appendix B: Names for Experiment 3
Condition 1 × 0 | Names expected for pre-evolution Pokémons | Names expected for post-evolution Pokémons |
|---|---|---|
Pair 1 | Rilata | Dilapa |
Pair 2 | Miupessa | Ziutefa |
Pair 3 | Ruakel | Juachel |
Pair 4 | Lilnonox | Giscomox |
Pair 5 | Kofole | Gotoke |
Pair 6 | Crepifo | Dressimo |
Pair 7 | Fessuta | Denuna |
Pair 8 | Foama | Zoana |
Pair 9 | Sossepra | Domecra |
Pair 10 | Lompoco | Gostoro |
Condition 2 × 0 | Names expected for pre-evolution Pokémons | Names expected for post-evolution Pokémons |
|---|---|---|
Pair 1 | Pumpocla | Durzocla |
Pair 2 | Fripoma | Dribopa |
Pair 3 | Noporam | Bovomam |
Pair 4 | Secara | Vejacha |
Pair 5 | Namila | Babirra |
Pair 6 | Cenice | Bessize |
Pair 7 | Xitefar | Gimevar |
Pair 8 | Trapena | Graceba |
Pair 9 | Furofo | Dupojo |
Pair 10 | Flofesse | Glossebe |
Condition 3 × 0 | Names expected for pre-evolution Pokémons | Names expected for post-evolution Pokémons |
|---|---|---|
Pair 1 | Potula | Boduza |
Pair 2 | Rapomo | Zazogo |
Pair 3 | Funcrema | Zungreva |
Pair 4 | Cunetri | Dujedri |
Pair 5 | Mikepe | Zibeve |
Pair 6 | Flukini | Blubiji |
Pair 7 | Serselo | Jervego |
Pair 8 | Milete | Vijebe |
Pair 9 | Nipriro | Didrivo |
Pair 10 | Rofato | Vogazo |
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Godoy, M.C., de Souza Filho, N.S., de Souza, J.G.M. et al. Gotta Name’em All: an Experimental Study on the Sound Symbolism of Pokémon Names in Brazilian Portuguese. J Psycholinguist Res 49, 717–740 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09679-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09679-2