lingthusiasm
patreon
21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles
🕑 Added 2018-06-22 03:04:23 +0000 UTC Most of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: there’s no particular reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of sounds in the word “cat”, and indeed other languages have different words for the same animal. But sometimes it may not be so arbitrary. Take these two shapes: a sharp, spiky 🗯 and a soft, rounded 💭 and these two names: “bouba” and “kiki”. If you had to assign one name to each shape, which would you pick?(Here’s a pause to let you think about it.)
If you said that the spiky shape was kiki and the round shape was bouba, you’re like 90% of English speakers who answer this question. But does this work the same way for speakers of other languages? What about languages that don’t have a /b/ or a /k/ sound, or that have other features, like tone?
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your host Lauren Gawne talks with guest linguist Dr Suzy Styles about how language interacts with your other senses like vision and touch, and doing research across different cultures and languages. Suzy is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and runs the BLIP (Brain Language Intersensory Processing) lab.
We also announced two new Patreon funding goals, the first ($2,000) is to film our first video episode, taking a look at gesture. The second ($2,500) is to film at least one video interview discussing signed languages with a deaf linguist. We’re excited by the possibility of making these video episodes about linguistic topics that are a bit hard to convey in audio-only form!
To see this episode's shownotes, go to: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/175127434871/lingthusiasm-episode-21-what-words-sound-spiky
Comments
Wow, this is actually deeply fascinating when applied to autistic people. (Disclaimer: I am autistic, but every autistic person is different) What a lot of people don't realize about autistic people is how deeply our sensory processing affects the rest of us. A large part of our sensory processing disorder is that our filter is shotty or even non-existent and so we are constantly faced with the full force of our senses. Now I'm thinking about how that may be a direct impact (in other ways than overwhelm) to our language differences/difficulties and damn it'd be so interesting to study.
Really interesting episode! Plus now I have a great mnemonic for remembering how to spell "weird" =)
