The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution

Abstract

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 important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture.

Keywords: iconic gesture; language acquisition; language evolution; lexical development; sound symbolism.

Figure 1.

Wood Rail, Aramides calopterus (a) and Great Tinamow, Tinamus major (b), which are allied species in Berlin [21]. Drawn by Joseph Smit [22,23]. (Online version in colour.)

Figure 2.

An example of manner of walking, used by Imai et al. [63], which sound-symbolically matches the novel word, ‘nosunosu’. In a pretest, Japanese- and English-speaking adults judged the novel word ‘nosunosu’ to sound-symbolically match this heavy and slow manner of walking. (Online version in colour.)