The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only
partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the languages of the world …

In many everyday situations, our senses are bombarded by many different unisensory
signals at any given time. To gain the most veridical, and least variable, estimate of …

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We
review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an …

Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing
particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (eg, objects of a certain size or shape) …

Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between
linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European …

In this article, the evidence demonstrating the existence of a variety of robust crossmodal
correspondences between both sounds (phonetic speech sounds, tones, and other …

Our understanding of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language has traditionally
been firmly based on spoken Indo-European languages and on language studied as …

A striking demonstration that sound–object correspondences are not completely arbitrary is
that adults map nonsense words with rounded vowels (eg bouba) to rounded shapes and …

Some words are sound-symbolic in that they involve a non-arbitrary relationship between
sound and meaning. Here, we report that 25-month-old children are sensitive to cross …

A 2015 James Beard Award Finalist:" Eye-opening, insightful, and huge fun to read."—Bee
Wilson, author of Consider the Fork Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good …