Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages

TLDR

While spoken language is generally considered to have an arbitrary sound‑meaning relationship, prior studies have identified nonarbitrary associations in only a few languages. The authors analyzed word lists from nearly two‑thirds of the world's languages, showing that many of 100 basic vocabulary items consistently associate with particular speech sounds across continents and linguistic families. The study found that property words such as “small” with /i/ and “full” with /p/ or /b/, and body part terms like “tongue” with /l/ and “nose” with /n/, exhibit strong sound‑meaning associations that appear to arise independently across languages, underscoring their importance for cross‑modal mapping, language acquisition, and human communication evolution.

Abstract

It is widely assumed that one of the fundamental properties of spoken language is the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning. Some exceptions in the form of nonarbitrary associations have been documented in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, but these studies only involved small subsets of the 6,000+ languages spoken in the world today. By analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world's languages, we demonstrate that a considerable proportion of 100 basic vocabulary items carry strong associations with specific kinds of human speech sounds, occurring persistently across continents and linguistic lineages (linguistic families or isolates). Prominently among these relations, we find property words ("small" and i, "full" and p or b) and body part terms ("tongue" and l, "nose" and n). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species' unique communication system.