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Preferred sound groups of vocal iconicity reflect evolutionary mechanisms of sound stability and first language acquisition : evidence from Eurasia

Dellert, Johannes ; Erben Johansson, Niklas LU orcid ; Frid, Johan LU orcid and Carling, Gerd LU (2021) In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376(1824).
Abstract
In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and ‘blind’ to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We... (More)
In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and ‘blind’ to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates with iconic occurrence in the global set. Further, we find that sound stability and iconic occurrence of consonants are connected to acquisition order in the first language, indicating that children acquiring language play a role in maintaining vocal iconicity over time. (Less)
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author
; ; and
organization
publishing date
type
Contribution to journal
publication status
published
subject
in
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
volume
376
issue
1824
pages
9 pages
publisher
Royal Society Publishing
external identifiers
  • scopus:85103231647
  • pmid:33745304
ISSN
1471-2970
DOI
10.1098/rstb.2020.0190
project
Språkbanken & Swe-Clarin
Chronology of roots and nodes of family trees. Fine-tuning the instruments of linguistic dating
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
f3f8895d-19be-47bd-a3a1-8db5492b07f2
date added to LUP
2021-02-15 12:20:26
date last changed
2025-01-24 06:28:45
@article{f3f8895d-19be-47bd-a3a1-8db5492b07f2,
  abstract     = {{In speech, the connection between sounds and word meanings is mostly arbitrary. However, among basic concepts of the vocabulary, several words can be shown to exhibit some degree of form–meaning resemblance, a feature labelled vocal iconicity. Vocal iconicity plays a role in first language acquisition and was likely prominent also in pre-historic language. However, an unsolved question is how vocal iconicity survives sound evolution, which is assumed to be inevitable and ‘blind’ to the meaning of words. We analyse the evolution of sound groups on 1016 basic vocabulary concepts in 107 Eurasian languages, building on automated homologue clustering and sound sequence alignment to infer relative stability of sound groups over time. We correlate this result with the occurrence of sound groups in iconic vocabulary, measured on a cross-linguistic dataset of 344 concepts across single-language samples from 245 families. We find that the sound stability of the Eurasian set correlates with iconic occurrence in the global set. Further, we find that sound stability and iconic occurrence of consonants are connected to acquisition order in the first language, indicating that children acquiring language play a role in maintaining vocal iconicity over time.}},
  author       = {{Dellert, Johannes and Erben Johansson, Niklas and Frid, Johan and Carling, Gerd}},
  issn         = {{1471-2970}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  month        = {{03}},
  number       = {{1824}},
  publisher    = {{Royal Society Publishing}},
  series       = {{Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences}},
  title        = {{Preferred sound groups of vocal iconicity reflect evolutionary mechanisms of sound stability and first language acquisition : evidence from Eurasia}},
  url          = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0190}},
  doi          = {{10.1098/rstb.2020.0190}},
  volume       = {{376}},
  year         = {{2021}},
}