ABSTRACT
Hypothesis about the relationship of linguistic sounds to acoustic or optical phenomena in the extralinguistic world. Sound-symbolic word formations (as in cuckoo, bang) raise the question of the psycholinguistic origin of naming extralinguistic states of affairs onomatopoeically ( onomatopoeia). Even if sound symbolism is not a universal phenomenon, numerous experiments do appear to demonstrate certain similarities in the way individuals perceive the relationship between language sounds and sensory impressions. Thus, a majority of speakers of different languages attribute the expression malume to the round and takete to the pointy stick figure (see figures below), though both figures are inherently meaningless (see Köhler 1947).
