Sound Symbolism - Relationship With Neuroscience

Relationship With Neuroscience

In the 2003 BBC Reith Lectures, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran outlined his research into the links between brain structure and function. In the fourth lecture of the series he describes the phenomena of synesthesia in which people experience, for example, sounds in terms of colors, or sounds in terms of tastes. In one type of synesthesia, people see numbers, letters of the alphabet, or even musical notes as having a distinct color. Ramachandran proposes a model for how language might have evolved. The theory may explain how humans create metaphors and how sounds can be metaphors for images – why for example sounds can be described as "bright" or "dull". In explaining how language might have evolved from cross activation of adjacent areas in the brain, Ramachandran notes four crucial factors, not all related to language, but which combined might have resulted in the emergence of language. Two of these four processes are of particular interest here.

Synesthetic cross modal abstraction: i.e. we recognize properties that sounds and images have in common and abstract them to store them independently. The sounds and shapes of the objects have characteristics in common that can be abstracted; for example, a "sharp", "cutting" quality of a word, and the shape it describes. Ramachandran calls this the 'Bouba/kiki effect', based on the results of an experiment with two abstract shapes, one blob-like and the other spiky, that asked people to relate the nonsense words bouba and kiki to them. The effect is real and observable, repeatable across linguistic groups, and evident even in the description of the experiment (with the bouba shape usually described using similar-sounding words like bulbous or blobby while the kiki shape is prickly or spiky).

Built in preexisting cross activation. Ramachandran points out that areas of the brain which appear to be involved in the mix-ups in synesthesia are adjacent to each other physically, and that cross-wiring, or cross activation, could explain synesthesia and our ability to make metaphors. He notes that the areas that control the muscles around the mouth are also adjacent to the visual centers, and suggests that certain words appear to make our mouth imitate the thing we are describing. Examples of this might be words like "teeny weeny", "diminutive" to describe small things; "large" or "enormous" to describe big things.