Are Mongolian speakers sensitive to iconicity

Abstract

 The association between sign and meaning is widely researched by numerous scholars and concluded effective results in various languages. While for minority languages, like Mongolian, there are limited studies about the relationship between phonemes and senses. In this dissertation, we investigated whether the general features of iconicity match to the meanings of Mongolian words and which feature of Mongolian consonants (place of articulation, manner of articulation, aspiration and voicing or not) related to participants’ judgements in experiment of matching pseudowords with specific semantic attributes. We examined 36 participants’ judgments about the appropriateness of 320 pseudowords visually demonstrated on a computer screen, associating with 8 distinct semantic features. For the question about cross-linguistic sound symbolism, the results illustrated that several cross-linguistically nonarbitrary associations are not appropriate for the situation of Mongolian. For the question about consonant features, the manner of articulation of consonants relates more closely to meaning judgements than place of articulation in Mongolian. However, to obtain a more general and comprehensive understanding of Mongolian sound symbolism, plenty of studies are necessary.