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Record W4408534134 · doi:10.5539/ijel.v15n2p52

Sound Symbolism in Speakers of English: A Qualitative Synthesis

2025· article· en· W4408534134 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Szymon Pindur

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of English Linguistics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicLanguage, Metaphor, and Cognition
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSound (geography)LinguisticsPsychologyAcousticsPhilosophyPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The present article contains a systematic synthesis of behavioral studies of sound symbolism—associations of speech sounds and their features with certain semantic or perceptual features—among speakers of English. We first offer a cut-through view of the concepts and ideas relevant to the study of sound symbolism, including empirical approaches and proposed explanations of this phenomenon, and the association mechanisms that it might involve. In light of these theoretical considerations, we present the associations between phoneme features and semantic dimensions, such as size, shape, etc., identified in the systematically compiled behavioral experiments. We pay attention to the most consistent associations and attempt to derive more general tendencies while also considering the magnitude of the effects and noting the limitations of the approach. At the end of the article, a hypothetical explanation of such association patterns is proposed, stipulating that they align along the perceived complexity of the sound wave, measured in terms of its entropy.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.008
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.013
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.042

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0080.013
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0030.007
Scholarly communication0.0040.003
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.364
Teacher spread0.339 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueInternational Journal of English LinguisticsSame topicLanguage, Metaphor, and CognitionFrench-language works237,207