Spatial sound symbolism: A cross-linguistic study

Recent behavioral evidence shows that the spatial concepts of front and back are sound symbolically tied to vowels that are pronounced either at the front or the back of the mouth, respectively. With such effects found from behavioral experiments, we examined whether such phenomenon could be found cross-linguistically from words pertaining to the concepts of front and back. The frequency counts of vowels of such words from 266 languages were extracted and analyzed. The analysis showed statistically significant differences in frequency counts of vowels between the back and front concepts. These findings suggest that the phenomenon of vowel articulation connecting to word meaning does have some cross-linguistic basis and hints at a common motor-sensory foundation for spatial sound symbolic effects.