TY - JOUR
T1 - Gotta Name’em All
T2 - an Experimental Study on the Sound Symbolism of Pokémon Names in Brazilian Portuguese
AU - Godoy, Mahayana C.
AU - de Souza Filho, Neemias Silva
AU - de Souza, Juliana G.Marques
AU - França, Hális A.N.
AU - Kawahara, Shigeto
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Matheus Mafra for his work on the first and second experiments described in this paper. We are also grateful to Ms. toto-mame for allowing us to use her pictures for the current experiments. This project is partially supported by the JSPS grant #17K13448.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2020/10/1
Y1 - 2020/10/1
N2 - Sound-symbolic patterns which relate to the perception of size were found to motivate the behavior of English and Japanese speakers in the naming of pre- and post-evolution Pokémon. The current study builds from this finding and investigates which sound-symbolic association speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) employ to name Pokémon characters. Results from 3 experiments show that vowel quality, phonological length and voiced obstruents, usually used to signal differences in size, are used to signal differences in evolution; however, the effects of voiced obstruents are not identical to what was previously observed in the behavior of Japanese speakers. We argue that although there is a universal sound symbolism associated with these sounds and the perception of largeness, its manifestation differs cross-linguistically. To the best of our knowledge, this is one the first experimental research to investigate sound symbolism and the perception of size in BP.
AB - Sound-symbolic patterns which relate to the perception of size were found to motivate the behavior of English and Japanese speakers in the naming of pre- and post-evolution Pokémon. The current study builds from this finding and investigates which sound-symbolic association speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) employ to name Pokémon characters. Results from 3 experiments show that vowel quality, phonological length and voiced obstruents, usually used to signal differences in size, are used to signal differences in evolution; however, the effects of voiced obstruents are not identical to what was previously observed in the behavior of Japanese speakers. We argue that although there is a universal sound symbolism associated with these sounds and the perception of largeness, its manifestation differs cross-linguistically. To the best of our knowledge, this is one the first experimental research to investigate sound symbolism and the perception of size in BP.
KW - Brazilian Portuguese
KW - Pokémon
KW - Sound symbolism
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85075366407&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/s10936-019-09679-2
DO - 10.1007/s10936-019-09679-2
M3 - Article
C2 - 31758426
AN - SCOPUS:85075366407
SN - 0090-6905
VL - 49
SP - 717
EP - 740
JO - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
JF - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
IS - 5
ER -