Phonetic Symbolism in Adult Native Speakers of English: Three Studies

Abstract

Three studies using adult native speakers of English are reported. Each study asked subjects to label elliptical or triangular figures of different size with a CVC trigram. It was the purpose of these studies to obtain evidence in support of the " phonetic symbolism " hypothesis. Subjects agreed about the relationship between vowel sounds and the size of figure regardless of shape. The sound /a/ was more often chosen for large figures while /i/ was more often chosen for small. A less striking but discernible trend was observed for the labelling of figures with vowel sounds. It was tentatively concluded that, for English speakers, there do exist unrecognized yet consistent bases for relating sounds and visual stimuli.