Sound Symbolism & Infant Language Learning

Moma is Round and Kipi is Spiky: How Sound Symbolism Can Support Infant Language Learning

You’re probably familiar with the term onomatopoeia, and its presence in animal sounds like “purr,” “quack,” or “woof,” – the kinds of words we especially like to use with young children. These words imitate sounds we hear in the world around us, and they don’t have to just be animal sounds. Consider words like “sizzle” or “crack.”

Onomatopoeia is just one category of words where sounds and meanings have a connection – this concept is called sound symbolism.

Most words across all languages have meanings that do not connect with the sound of the word itself. If you think about it, the words in our vocabularies for different nouns, verbs, and other elements of language seem to be largely arbitrary, especially in English.

However, studies such as those exploring Korean and Cantonese, have revealed that sound symbolism is more common across languages than we may have thought. There appears to be a fascinating link between sound symbolism and how we develop language as infants – a link that can be found as early as 11-months-old.

When infants hear a spoken word and see a visual stimulus, they are already trying to make a connection between these two things. So, when the sound and the visual can be matched together via sound symbolism, it will take much less effort for the infant to form an association between the two.

This has been demonstrated in research, including in a study of 14-month-old Japanese-speaking infants. In this study, the infants were presented with two word-shape pairs. Half of the infants experienced a word and shape that sound-symbolically matched (‘moma’ for a round shape and ‘kipi’ for a spiky shape), while the other half of the infants experienced a mismatching word and shape (‘moma’ for a spiky shape and ‘kipi’ for a round shape).

The words chosen for the study, ‘moma’ and ‘kipi,’ were inspired by Köhler’s shape sound symbolism studies, where speakers of different languages judged the word ‘maluma’ to be a more appropriate label for a round object, and ‘takete’ to correspond better with a spiky object.

After repeated exposures to either the matching or mismatching pairs, the infants in the study were shown the two different shapes side-by-side and heard either the word ‘moma’ or ‘kipi’ over a speaker. The infants in the group that were exposed to the sound-symbolically matching pairs (‘moma’ for a round shape and ‘kipi’ for a spiky shape) looked faster and longer at the shape that had been associated with the word in their repeated exposures compared to the group that had been exposed to mismatching word-shape pairs.

This finding suggests that sound symbolism in the matching pairs helped the infants learn word-object associations.

At the Little Magpies Lab, one of our current studies also incorporates sound symbolism with word learning. In our study, we will be investigating whether infants will benefit from a sound symbolism training phase to pair new words and objects.

We are now recruiting infants from 14- to 16-months-old for this study! If you, or someone you know, is interested in participating in the research, please email us at magpies@ualberta.ca for more information. If you’d like to be contacted for future studies, we encourage you to sign up for the ChIRP list to be contacted when a new study is recruiting participants.

It appears that sound symbolism has more to it than meets the… ear. Join our studies to help us uncover more about this fascinating feature of human language and how it affects infant language development!

Caiti Farquharson

November 2022

Psychology & Linguistics Student at the University of Alberta