Phonetic meaning

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Dear Professor Val Belianine,

I believe there are a few little flaws in your experiment:

1) Respondent don't hear the sound itself, but see its phonetic 
representation, so what they are evaluating is the mental representation of 
the phonetic symbol (if they know it). You can't be sure whether what 
respondents are evaluating is this mental representation, their "reading" 
of word lists, a mental representation of orthographic symbols (for 
example, phonetic [u:] may be spelled "oo"), or a combination of the above. 
It may be the case that the perceived quality of a sound is modified by its 
graphical representation associated typically with another sound. So it may 
be the case that the diphthong in "row" is, say, "colder" for someone than 
the same diphtong in "go" or "boat", but you don't have any way to know 
which word(s) in the word list the respondent has focused on.

2) Not all sound distributions are contemplated. For example, you don't 
present an example of initial [u:] like in "ooze".

3) Some are not sounds, but sound combinations, such as "kw".

4) If the experiment is on *sounds* (not phonemes), different scales would 
be needed for variants, such as Standard American English [ou] and British 
English <schwa-U>. You group these two variants in the same item. Since you 
don't know the respondent's dialect, you don't know whether they are 
evaluating one or the other variant.

5) The evaluation of sounds on some scales, such as "fast/slow", 
"small/large" or "relaxed/tense", may be influenced by the respondent's 
technical knowledge of sound classifications based on articulatory or 
acoustic features (such as the "long/short" or "lax/tense" oppositions).

6) Allophones are grouped together, such as word-initial and medial /p/ 
([ph] and [p] are different sounds: one may be "stronger" than the other in 
the respondent's mind.

7) You assume the sound you present is realized by the respondent equally 
in all words you present in its corresponding word list. For example, for 
<schwa> you give these examples: "walkER, finAlly, According, Account, 
findER". Well, in American dialects some of these are schwa, others are 
rhoticized schwa or even two sounds: [<schwa> r]. So you seem to be talking 
about phonemes, in which case you should note all possible realizations of 
each item in all English dialects.

7) Some words don't correspond with the sound being evaluated. For example, 
in your list velar nasal [N], "aNGle, siNGle, readiNG, raNG", only the last 
two are correct. In "aNGle" and "siNGle" what English has is two sounds, 
velar nasal and velar voiced stop [g].  What is the respondent evaluating, 
one or two sounds?

8) Since your hypothesis is that all sounds are either more or less "hot" 
or more or less "cold" (for instance), and that influences "the connotation 
of the text", if your hypothesis is proven statistically then there's a 
little circularity problem, since the meaning of "hot", which is 
phonetically [hOt], will have a different "connotations" for those who 
evaluate the sounds [h], [O] and [t] differently. The same applies to 
"cold", which also contains sounds/letters that "mean" things, and so on. 
For example, for those for whom those three sounds are very "hot" in your 
scale, then the word "hot" means hotter (more temperature) than those who 
consider open [h], [O] and [t] "cold" sounds.

Etc.


In brief, companies such as yours should do a much better job in hiring 
better linguists to design these "experiments":

>This method may be helpful in finding a proper name for your company, and 
>building your future.

Believe it or not, there's a lot of unemployment in linguistics.  The "new 
history of phonosemantics" you announce was invented decades time ago by 
three big names: MaC Donald's, MaC-Intosh, and MiC-rosoft. Just a coincidence?

If you liked my comments to your project, I'd be glad to be hired for a 
high fee.

Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
lxalvarz at udc.es
http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/


At 10:59 29/11/02 -0500, you wrote:
>Dear discourse-digest-readers!
>I am a psycholinguist dealing now with sound symbolism and phonetic 
>meaning. I have a hypothesis that all the sounds may be viewed upon as hot 
>or cold, fast or slow, merry or sad. This makes the connotation of the 
>text (even if we read it).
>
>In the autumn, I have launched a psycholinguistic experiment on evaluation 
>of the sounds of the English language. I am happy to tell you that results 
>of my experiment will be available soon for all those who participated in 
>the poll.
>
>Unfortunately, I have only half of the data I need. In addition, not all 
>the results are statistically valid yet. I need your help with the project 
>SoundLetter. Your some 20 minutes of time will make the new history of 
>phonosemantics happen.
>
>Please go to the web-site http://www.almex.net/psycholinguistics/soundform
>
>Thank you. Val Belianine, Ph.D. in psycholinguistics val at almex.net