#ideophones

When we started planning the special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics in honour of Barbara F. Kelly, I immediately knew that this was the work I wanted to submit to the collection. This is a project that I had been tinkering on with my collaborators for a while, but this was the perfect venue that got me to pull it together.

This project draws together two research interests that Barb and I shared: Tibeto-Burman languages and the use of gesture. It was also great to work on this with Kristine Hildebrandt, who was Barb's close grad school friend, and Suzy Styles, who contributed an excellent illustrative figure as well as her expertise in cross-sensory representation.

Abstract

This paper examines onomatopoeia and gesture in the description of earthquakes, to better understand how people produce complex multimodal representations of experiences. We use narratives from New Zealand English speakers (2010/2011 earthquakes around Christchurch), and from Nubri and Syuba (Tibeto-Burman) speakers (2015 earthquakes in Nepal). We selected 16 narratives from each event. Between the two datasets there were distinct preferences regarding onomatopoeia; no English speakers used onomatopoeia, while seven participants across the Nepal narratives did, using distinct onomatopoeic tokens, which conformed to similar phonetic shapes. Speakers across all groups used gesture to iconically represent the earthquake, with similarities across groups regarding a preference for two hands and repetition of movement. New Zealand participants consistently used vertical gesture trajectory, while the Nepali participants used horizontal-trajectory gestures. We argue that this is likely a result of cultural context but also the interaction of housing types with the motion of an earthquake, and represents iconic information in the gestural channel that is not captured in the spoken channel. This paper illustrates the importance of considering the multimodal iconic representation of events in narrative to build an understanding of the sensory experience of an event that is shared in the retelling.

Citation

Gawne, Lauren, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, and Suzy Styles. (2025). ‘Natural disasters elicit spontaneous multimodal iconicity in onomatopoeia and gesture: Earthquake narratives from Nepal and New Zealand’, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 45/3: 448–65. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2025.2506628

See also

AJL Special Issue: In Memory of Barbara F. Kelly (45.3)

Australian Journal of Linguistics special issue in honour of Barbara Frances Kelly (Superlinguo blog post)

Barb Kelly (Superlinguo blog post)

New research article: Reported speech in earthquake narratives from six Tibeto-Burman languages in Studies in Language

We all know cows go 'moo', sheep go 'baa' and ducks go 'queck'... well medieval English ducks did. Dutch cows go 'boe' /bu/ and Korean sheep go 음매 (eum-mae).  What is it about sounds that make a sheep sound like a sheep, and how can the name of an ice cream flavour make it sound more delicious?

In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Lauren tests Gretchen on Syuba onomatopoeia, Gretchen quizzes Lauren about good names for different products as we explore ideophones, sound symbolism and their role in understanding the world.

Listen here! 

Dingemanse, M. (2018). Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 3(1), 4. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.444            

Table 4. Reported magnitude of some well-documented ideophone inventories.

So a few months back, we did an episode about the arbitrariness of the sign, the idea that there isn’t really a deep meaningful connection between sounds and meanings. So, there’s no real reason that [dɑg] should mean “dog”, and in fact, across different languages, you can find a lot of different words that mean “dog”: chien in French, inu in Japanese, kelev in Hebrew, etc.

Now, there’s some obvious exceptions to this, like onomatopoeia. There’s definitely some meaningful link between “quack” and the noise a duck makes. But beyond that, there’s also a class of words called ideophones, which have similar kinds of sound-symbolic resonances as onomatopoeia, but which describe states of being, or kinds of action, or other non-sound-effect things. English doesn’t have many of these, but other languages, like Japanese, do. Like, [waɾaɯ] may be to smile or laugh, but you can modify it: add [nikoniko], and you’re grinning; [nijanija], and you’re smirking; [geɾageɾa] and you’re guffawing, etc.

At first glance, those might seem like things that are specific to Japanese. But like we talked about in the episode, a few months back, a study found that Dutch speakers were actually sensitive to the ideophones - that even without the Japanese context, the sound symbolism helped the Dutch participants learn the new words.

But even cooler - in a new study recently published, they’ve replicated the effect, and added in some neurolinguistic, ERP data on top. One of the authors of the study, Gwilym Lockwood, has written up a really accessible version of it for his blog (with fun pictures, even), and I definitely recommend going and checking it out to get the full details.

And that ERP data is really interesting - it suggests there really is a difference in how well people learn these ideophones, based on how sensitive they were to the sound symbolism as a guide to learning the correct words in the study. There’s an effect associated with learning and memory, the P300, and those Dutch participants who are better attuned to the symbolism show a stronger version of that P300, compared to those who were weaker with the symbolism in the rest of the test, who didn’t show much of a P300 at all. (There’s even a link to some preliminary data from synaesthetics, which is super intriguing.)

How much meaning is there just in sounds? How much are words alike across languages? In this week's episode, we talk about the arbitrariness of the sign: how our sounds don't have to connect to the meanings they do, how much cases like onomatopoeia serve as a counter to the random matching of words, and whether individual sounds or syllables carry their own semantic punch.

An interesting description of recent research into sound symbolism, from Bustle:  

To explore how sensitive native Dutch speakers are to sound-symbolism, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in the Netherlands devised learning exercises using Japanese ideophones. From the thousands of mimetics in the Japanese language, researchers started with a list of 376 words. They eliminated all but 95 that had clear easily-understandable Dutch translations (for example, the ideophone "fuwafuwa" which means “fluffy”).

In the first test, 26 male and female participants (ages 22 through 35) both saw and heard a recording of the Japanese word. They then had to identify the definition that best matched the word from a choice of two given, one being the true definition and the other the opposite. The participants guessed the correct definition 63.1 percent of the time, which was above chance accuracy. [...]

In a final test, 30 participants were shown the real definition for 19 ideophones, and for 19 others they were taught the opposite meaning. Participants remembered the real word pairings 86.1 percent of the time, and correctly remembered the opposite word pairing with only 71.1 percent accuracy. They were then informed that some of what they were taught had the wrong meaning, and were encouraged to pick the meanings for the words that sounded correct to them. Even though 50 percent of what they had been taught was incorrect, the participants guessed the true meanings above chance at 72.3 percent accuracy. They also responded faster when the sound-symbolic words were paired with the correct definition.

As a control, a different set of 30 Dutch participants were put through a similar test with regular Japanese adjectives and their definitions. They guessed the correct translations with better than chance accuracy at 55.3 percent (but lower than sound-symbolic words). However, their learning and accuracy of the words and meanings didn’t improve over time.

The full text of the paper, by Gwilym Lockwood, Mark Dingemanse, and Peter Hagoort is available here and at 8 pages, it’s a pretty quick read and worth checking out at least for the fun examples of Japanese and Dutch ideophones.