Edited by Masako K. Hiraga, William J. Herlofsky, Kazuko Shinohara and Kimi Akita
Iconicity: East Meets West presents an intersection of East-West scholarship on Iconicity. Several of its chapters thus deal with Asian languages and cultures, or a comparison of world languages. Divided into four categories: general issues; sound symbolism and mimetics; iconicity in literary… read more
This study explores the sound-symbolic effects of Japanese consonants on image of food textures. Our experiment tested whether voiced vs. voiceless plosives, at various places of articulation, could affect participants’ image of the hardness of a snack. The results revealed that both voicing and… read more
This chapter explores how Japanese mimetics are used to verbally express the texture of rice crackers in real and imagined cases. Two experiments were conducted to test whether the use of mimetics varies when eating rice crackers as opposed to merely imagining eating rice crackers. The analysis… read more
This paper reports two case studies of sound symbolism using the naturalistic name corpora of characters from Disney and Pokémon. Building upon previous studies of sound symbolism, we tested two hypotheses: (1) voiced obstruents, which are generally associated with negative images, are favored… read more
The current study offers a new case of an iconic relationship amongst different modalities of cognition, going beyond traditional studies of sound symbolism. We report experiments that show that particular types of personalities can be iconically related to particular types of sounds and shapes. Two… read more
This paper analyzes frames of reference involved in linguistic expression of spatial relations of objects, using an experimental method. Objects with and without intrinsic orientation are used as the figure object, and it is demonstrated that there exists in Japanese a phenomenon we call… read more
