PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Iconicity postulates a non-arbitrary relationship between a word’s form and its referents’ phonetic properties, an effect found cross-linguistically and across writing systems (D’Onofrio, 2014; C´wiek, 2022). Ohala (1994)’s Frequency Code predicts low pitch and formant values for animals trying to appear big. Recent works have linked small entities to closed, front vowels and voiceless consonants. while big entities have been associated with open vowels and voiced consonants (Schmitz, 2022; C´wiek, 2022; Christoph and C´wiek, 2022). Often, the association of sound and meaning is investigated through perception experiments, whereas this is a preliminary study on the production of non-word vocalisations and their relation with iconicity. We use data from an English radio show where contestants were asked to produce sounds associated with different entities. We investigate whether animacy, animal size, and animal group affect the selection of consonantal and vocalic features. Syllable boundaries were marked and the vocalic and consonantal features were labelled manually. The quality of the recordings we used made automated annotations impossible. 289 consonants and 233 vowels produced by 27 participants were analyzed using Multinomial Logistic Regression (Venables and Ripley, 2002). Table 1 shows that animacy affected the use of place and manner of articulation as well as voicing in consonants. Within the animate group, animal size showed a significant effect on the manner of articulation. Additionally, animal group affected the place and manner of articulation. For vowels, Table 2 illustrates that animacy affected only openness. Animal size showed a significant effect on vowel openness and height, while animal group failed to affect any vocalic features. Our results corroborate earlier findings on the effect of size on vowel openness but raise questions against the relation between voicing and size. Our data alludes to the importance of production studies on iconicity. Furthermore, we show that the consonantal features played a more important role in marking iconicity than the vocalic features.