It’s my pleasure to tell that our latest paper “Sound symbolic potential of Russian onomatopoeias: Evidence from eye-tracking” is available online. In this paper, we investigated whether native Finnish speakers can grasp the meaning of Russian onomatopoeic words without any prior knowledge of the Russian language. In Experiment 1, elicitation test, naïve listeners generated associations for the acoustic events depicted by onomatopoeic words they heard. A cluster analysis suggested presence of different types of cues that affect the elicitation of associations. We labeled the clusters Facilitating, Counteracting, Mixed, and Undefined on basis of the types of the associations. In Experiment 2, the same stimulus words were used in an eye-tracking experiment using visual world paradigm. It was shown that the participants have even better chances to map the onomatopoeic words to the correct semantic domain when extralinguistic information is available, in this case target images presented on the experimental display. The availability of both audio and visual inputs substantially boosted this process in all four clusters. Our findings support the view that imitative sound symbolism offers a scaffolding material for connecting onomatopoeias to their referents when words are pronounced in isolation.
Kanerva, O & Häikiö, T. (2022). Sound symbolic potential of Russian onomatopoeias: Evidence from eye-tracking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. doi:10.1037/xlm0001114
Tuomo Häikiö 