There has been a growing body of recent research which has established systematic and iconic associations between sound and meaning across different languages (e.g., Blasi et al. 2016; Dingemanse et al. 2013; Dingemanse et al. 2015 among many others; see Lockwood & Dingemanse 2015 for a recent review). This body of studies casts doubt on the claim that the sound-meaning relationship is fundamentally arbitrary, as proposed by Saussure’s (1916) influential work. A substantial body of these emerging studies have explored the nature of sound symbolism, the long-held notion (see Plato, Cratylus: 427a) that some sounds may be more suitable than others to name or summon perceptual categories such as shape, speed, size, or brightness.

The current amount of evidence in favor of sound symbolism has shifted the question from whether sound symbolism exists in natural languages to how it coexists with arbitrariness in language (Lockwood & Dingemanse 2015). It moreover fostered research on how sound symbolism contributes to first and second language acquisition (Imai & Kita 2014; Imai et al., 2008; Nygaard et al. 2009), its role in communication and the origins of human language (Perlman & Lupyan 2018; Perniss & Vigiliocco 2014) as well as potential parallels between sound symbolic mappings and phonological alternation patterns (Alderete & Kochetov 2017; Kawahara 2020a). As a consequence, studying the relationship between sound and meaning is becoming increasingly relevant for theoretical linguistics. While patterns of sound symbolism had not been seriously studied in the theoretical linguistics literature until very recently, the situation is rapidly changing (Kawahara 2020b). This paradigm shift is evidenced by the growing number of journals in general linguistics that have recently published papers on sound symbolism (e.g., Alderete & Kochetov 2017; Dingemanse et al. 2016 in Language, Kawahara 2020a in Phonology; Kawahara et al. 2018 in Phonetica; D’Onofrio, 2014 in Language and Speech). In order to understand how linguistic systems work, we should not ignore the fact that there is some degree of iconicity among existing words in the lexicon of natural languages (D’Anselmo et al. 2019; Perry et al. 2015; Winter et al. 2016). Experimental studies of sound symbolism using nonce words also reveal patterns that are very similar to the results of other phonology-related tasks (e.g. Kawahara 2020a). Overall, these emerging observations call for more work devoted to integrate sound symbolism in linguistic theories (Alderete & Kochetov 2017; Kawahara 2020a, b; Kumagai 2019; Jang 2020; Shih 2020). The current paper contributes to this growing research enterprise, by offering a new set of data from Brazilian Portuguese, a language that is heavily underrepresented in this research program.

More specifically, this paper reports on two experiments that use Pokémon names to explore sound symbolic patterns in Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth, BP). Specifically, we address what type of semantic concepts can be represented by sound symbolic associations in BP, and whether these patterns are comparable to those that are found in Japanese and English. Although sound symbolism has attracted much attention in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science, targeting various languages (Dingemanse et al. 2015; Imai & Kita 2014; Sidhu & Pexman 2018), there is a dearth of studies on this topic in the Lusophone scientific community. Only a few studies have examined sound symbolism in Portuguese (reviewed in Section 2); their results showed some intriguing trends regarding how BP speakers encode sound symbolism in their language, and how these patterns compare to those found in other languages. In the present study, we continue to compare sound symbolic patterns in BP with those in other languages. We hope that our results can serve as a stepping stone for fostering more research on sound symbolism within the field of Portuguese linguistics, thereby filling a gap in this ever-growing body of literature.

The rest of the paper is developed as follows. In the next section, we review core findings on sound symbolism and some theories that explain why we expect some sound symbolic patterns to be both universal and language-specific at the same time. In Section 2, we justify our methodological choice by reviewing the research advantages of using Pokémon names to study sound symbolism. Then we briefly review what we currently know about sound symbolism in BP (Section 3) before presenting the specific hypothesis tested (Section 4). In Sections 5 and 6 we describe two experiments which were designed to test specific sound symbolic patterns in BP.

Some of the most famous studies on sound symbolism are probably the ones that show associations between linguistic sounds and the physical properties of an object. In many languages, low/back vowels are associated with large objects, while high/front vowels tend to evoke smallness (Berlin 2006; Newman 1933; Sapir 1929; Shinohara & Kawahara 2016, among others). Another well-replicated finding is that voiceless obstruents are more likely to be used to name angular shapes, while sonorant consonants are preferably associated with round objects, a well-known observation now widely known as “the takete-maluma effect” or more recently, “the bouba-kiki effect” (Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001; Hollard & Wertheimer 1964; Maurer et al. 2006; Nielsen & Rendall 2013; Fort et al. 2014; but see Styles and Gawne 2017). Recently, studies have also shown that various other semantic concepts can be conveyed by sound symbolism, including speed (Cuskley 2013), precision (Maglio et al. 2014), darkness (Asano & Yokosawa 2011) and color (Moos et al. 2014, Cuskley et al. 2019).

Assessing the universality of these sound symbolic patterns is one of the most actively debated topics in the field, with a number of studies suggesting that some sound symbolic patterns are shared by speakers of typologically different languages (e.g., Blasi et al. 2016; Kawahara 2020b; Shih et al. 2018; Shinohara & Kawahara 2010). Sound symbolic patterns that seem ubiquitous pose the interesting question of why some sounds, and not others, have specific sound symbolic values across different languages. Why do voiceless stops, but not other phonemes, evoke angular shapes in so many languages, and why are larger objects associated specifically with low vowels, but not with high ones? Offering a definitive answer to these questions is beyond the scope of the present paper. However, laying out some hypotheses entertained by previous studies helps us situate the current experimental studies within a larger theoretical context, which we turn to now.

A common explanation for the apparent universality of sound symbolic associations is that sound symbolism is grounded in articulatory and acoustic properties of the speech signal. To the extent that speakers of different languages share the same articulators and speak in the same physical environment, the default expectation is that sound symbolic patterns should be shared by speakers of different languages. Ohala (1994), for example, argues that sound symbolic patterns associated with pitch—high-pitched sounds are associated with small images, while low-pitched sounds are associated with large images—may be grounded in the general physical principle that relates the shape of the vocal tract with its resonating frequency: “high resonances are typical of short vocal tracts which, in turn, are indicative of a small vocalizer; and conversely, low resonances of a larger vocalizer” (p. 333). If anatomy and physics play a role in defining sound symbolic associations, then it should not come as a surprise that some patterns are uniformly observed across different languages.

However, recent findings have also revealed cross-linguistic variations in some sound symbolic patterns as well. Speakers of different languages may even show sound-meaning mappings in opposite directions. This is what Saji et al. (2013) found, for example, when they asked Japanese and English speakers to name the action depicted in 70 locomotion videos. In both languages, affricates were associated with manners of motion, but in different ways; /t∫/ was associated with light and fast motion in Japanese, while the same sound was associated with heavy and non-energetic motion in English. Cross-linguistic variations were also reported by Perry et al. (2015), who identified differences on how English and Spanish speakers rated verbs in their native language: verbs were rated as more iconic in English than in Spanish. Finally, even the well-known bouba-kiki effect, reported to hold in various languages, failed to replicate in Songe, a Bantu language, and in Syuba, a Nepalese language (Styles & Gawne 2017).

These disparities between languages may be related to cross-linguistic differences in phonotactics, restrictions on what sounds or sound sequences are allowed in each language. Styles and Gawne (2017) point out that in Songe and Syuba the words used as stimuli in the bouba-kiki experiment were phonotactically illegal, which could be the cause of failure to replicate this effect in these languages. Saji et al. (2013) argue that, unlike in English, [t∫] in Japanese is not phonemic and instead occurs just as the result of palatalization, which may explain why speakers of these languages show different sound-meaning associations. As for the different iconicity ratings for verbs in Spanish and English, typological differences between verb semantics might have played a role: unlike English, Spanish is a verb-framed language according to Givón’s (1995) typology, in which manners of verbal actions are not directly encoded in the verbs themselves.

These explanations have a common theme: while there may be some universal bases for sound symbolic patterns, likely grounded in the physiological and physical properties of our speech, these sound symbolic associations interact with other linguistic properties. This idea is in line with the Sound Symbolism Bootstrapping Hypothesis (Imai & Kita 2014), one of the most influential hypotheses on sound symbolism to date. This hypothesis postulates that, initially, children have access to all sound symbolic correspondences grounded in iconic relationships between the acoustics/articulatory properties of sounds and their iconic meanings; however, they retain during their development just those that are compatible with their language’s phonotactics and grammar. In this theory, the universality is the default expectation, but it accommodates room for language-specificity.

All in all, assessing the universality and language-specificity of sound symbolic patterns is a prerequisite for delving into the roots of the sound symbolic phenomenon, and the role it may play in linguistic organization. To that end, recently, a research paradigm dubbed Pokémonastics (Shih et al. 2018) has used Pokémon names to study sound symbolic associations across different languages. This approach not only allows for a quantitative examination of sound symbolism, as there are many Pokémon characters, but also has the advantage of having a fixed set of denotations across languages. Given this, we can examine how these creatures are named across different languages, thereby enabling an efficient cross-linguistic comparison of sound symbolism (Shih et al. 2018). As will be reviewed in detail in the next section, this research paradigm also allows us to address the question of which semantic attributes can be denoted by sound symbolism.

Pokémon is a game franchise by ®Nintendo in which players battle using their collection of fictional monsters. These monsters, called Pokémon (truncation of [poketto monsutaa] ‘pocket monster’), have a number of attributes, which include strength, evolution, height and weight. The first work on Pokémonastics analyzed the Japanese Pokémon names and found that size-related attributes (weight and height), strength and evolution are all positively correlated with the number of voiced obstruents (e.g., /b, d, g, z/) contained in their names, as well as with these names’ phonological lengths (Kawahara et al. 2018).

Subsequent analyses examined whether similar patterns hold for Pokémon names in other languages including English, Korean, Russian, Mandarin, and Cantonese (Shih et al. 2018). Results show that some sound symbolic associations are present in different languages, but the way they manifest themselves or the extent to which they follow these patterns can be language-specific. The positive correlation between phonological length and some size/evolution parameters, for example, was found across all the target languages; simply put, the longer the name, the stronger the Pokémon tends to be in all of these languages, which is arguably a reflection of a more general sound symbolic principle, namely, “the iconicity of quantity” (Haiman 1980). However, which unit of phonological length showed this correlation varied across languages. In Japanese, for instance, there was a correlation between mora1 counts and evolution; in English, on the other hand, this correlation was found to be best characterized in terms of the number of segments (Shih et al. 2018; see also Kawahara & Moore 2021). In other cases, strong correlations found in one language were present in other languages, but with smaller effect size. For instance, voiced obstruents were strongly correlated to heavier Pokémon in Japanese, but the correlation was weaker in English; Kawahara and Kumagai (2019a) experimentally confirmed this observation.

Finally, some sound symbolic patterns were decidedly language-specific, and these differences may be caused by the fact that languages differ in how they code sound symbolic associations, and/or due to cross-linguistic differences in their phonological organization. For instance, Japanese, but not English, shows a positive correlation between evolutionary stage and the number of labial consonants, while English (but not Japanese) showed a strong correlation between vowel quality and weight/size parameters. Mandarin and Cantonese use tonal features, which are phonologically not contrastive in other languages, to signal differences in evolutionary status and power.

These exploratory analyses by Shih et al. (2018) point to the existence of arguably universal sound symbolism that holds across various languages, and offer a partial answer to the question of what may cause cross-linguistic differences in these sound symbolic patterns. However, there remain non-negligible caveats with these analyses. First, their corpora are restricted to existing Pokémon names. Second, the results remain silent about how speakers might name new characters. To this end, a number of experimental studies have investigated names that people create or choose for new Pokémon characters, which were not in the original franchise.

These experiments have shown that native speakers of English (Kawahara & Moore 2021; Kawahara & Breiss, 2021), Japanese (Kawahara & Kumagai 2019a), and BP (Godoy et al. 2019) do indeed employ sound symbolic patterns related to Pokémons’ physical attributes. The results replicate trends found in previous corpus studies, but with some language-specific similarities and differences. For instance, the effect of voiced obstruents to symbolically represent size/evolutionary status was stronger in Japanese than in English or in BP; on the other hand, phonological length correlated positively with evolutionary status in all three languages.

The use of Pokémon characters to study sound symbolism by way of experiments has several research advantages. The large corpora created by previous studies allow for systematically controlled cross-linguistic studies (Shih et al. 2018), which is a non-trivial advantage of using Pokémon names, since languages can differ in terms of the set of denotations that are assigned a name. A controlled comparison across languages is made possible by the fact that these studies used the same experimental stimuli (i.e. the same set of pseudo-Pokémon pictures). Therefore, the Pokémonastics paradigm is useful for tackling two questions we intend to address in this paper: (1) what type of semantic concepts can be sound-symbolically represented, and (2) which of these symbolic associations holds across different languages.

To address our first question, we examined what type of concepts can be coded using sound symbolism. As pointed out by Kawahara & Kumagai (2019b) and Sidhu & Pexman (2018), size and shape are two of the most well-studied patterns in sound symbolism, with findings that have been replicated across different languages (Berlin 2006; Newman 1933; Shinohara & Kawahara 2016; Ramachandran & Hubbard 2001; Hollard & Wertheimer 1964; Maurer et al. 2006; Nielsen & Rendall 2013 among others), including BP (Godoy et al. 2017; Silva and Bellini-Leite 2019). However, a natural question that arises is whether more abstract concepts, like justice and freedom, can be signaled by way of sound symbolism (Lupyan & Winter 2018). In general, the question of which semantic concepts can be symbolically represented is an understudied question in the general sound symbolic research. We believe that this question can best be addressed through more empirical case studies, and we hope that our studies contribute toward this goal.

This question is addressed within the Pokémonastics paradigm by investigating which sound symbolic patterns—if any—speakers use to signal Pokémon types. These types divide Pokémon characters into groups with common characteristics regarding the element or concept they represent (flying, water, fire, psychic, etc.), and the initial analyses (Hosokawa et al. 2018) found that the evil and the fairy type characters in Japanese were named in the original franchise with names that contained, more voiced obstruents and more labial consonants, respectively. Kawahara & Kumagai (2019b) and Kawahara et al. (2020) followed up on these initial studies with a series of experiments that suggest that Japanese speakers use sound symbolism to signal several Pokémon types.

The findings by Kawahara & Kumagai (2019b) and Kawahara et al. (2020) were later replicated with English speakers (Kawahara et al. submitted). These studies open up a new opportunity to address which sound symbolic patterns are universal and which are language-specific (see above, as well as Iwasaki et al. 2007 and Saji et al. 2013 for language-specific symbolic associations), a topic of study that, as reviewed above, may shed light on how sound symbolism develops during language acquisition (Imai & Kita, 2014; Kantartzis 2011), what role it might have played in language evolution and communication (Perlman & Lupyan, 2018) and what the physiological and physical roots of these associations are (Morton 1994; Ohala 1994). With these general questions in mind, we ask whether sound symbolic associations related to Pokémon types can be replicated with native speakers of BP. We reiterate at this point that studies of sound symbolism are flourishing in general, but currently only a handful of studies target BP. We feel that this gap should be filled.

To the best of our knowledge, there are only a few studies on sound symbolism in Portuguese. Apart from corpus-based research on ideophones in regional dialects of BP (Cruz & Fernandes 2004), and acoustic and perceptual analysis of speech expressivity (Madureira & Camargo 2010), few experimental studies have tested the perception or production of sound symbolism. Similar to many languages, behavioral and physiological experiments have shown that speakers of BP are sensitive to sound/shape symbolism while reading or listening to linguistic stimuli (Godoy et al. 2017; Silva & Bellini-Leite 2019). In general, sonorants like /m, l/ are associated with round shapes, while voiceless plosives such as /t, k/ are associated with angular and jagged images. Similarly, Wiseman and Van Peer (2003, see Aryani et al. 2013) show that BP speakers tend to associate nasal sounds with sad feelings and plosives with happiness when asked to produce fantasy words associated with emotions experienced at funerals and weddings. This study implies that concepts as abstract as sadness and happiness, not just size or shapes, can be symbolically represented.

Within the Pokémonastics paradigm, Godoy et al. (2019) report that BP speakers use sound symbolic patterns to signal the evolutionary status of Pokémon characters. Their study, using both production and comprehension tasks, suggests that BP speakers are similar to Japanese (Kawahara & Kumagai 2019a) in that they use vowel quality, phonological length and voiced obstruents to symbolically signal pre- and post-evolution Pokémon characters. BP speakers associate/produce names with fewer syllables and with the high vowel /i/ to refer to pre-evolution creatures, while associating names containing more syllables and the low vowel /a/ with post-evolution Pokémon. Additionally, this study showed that BP speakers associate the voiced obstruents /b, d, g, v, z, ʒ/ to larger, post-evolution characters. Because post-evolution characters tend to be larger and heavier, these trends are related to semantic concepts about physical properties, namely, size and shape. To date, no study investigated whether BP speakers use sound symbolism to signal differences in Pokémon types. This is the focus of the present paper.

By expanding on previous findings about sound symbolism within the Pokémonastics paradigm, the present study contributes to the field in a number of ways. First, it expands on what is known about the universality (and language-specificity) of the sound symbolic associations attested in other languages. A more indirect contribution is that by revealing sound symbolic mappings made by BP speakers, we can contribute to delving into the role of sound symbolism in communication and in first and second language acquisition. In order to do this, we need to discover which sound symbolic patterns are present in a target language. In addition, we explore some general methodological issues related to how sound symbolism can and should be tested. In the next section, we outline the two specific symbolic associations investigated in the current study. To the best of our knowledge, none of them has been tested in any dialect of Portuguese.

The current study tested two sound symbolic associations. The first is the connection between evilness and voiced obstruents, and the second is the association between sibilants and the idea of flying/air. In this section, we review what is known about these sound symbolic connections, and what issues will be addressed in our research.

Experiment 1 tested the voiced obstruents-evil and the sibilants-flying associations in a population of BP speakers. We addressed whether BP speakers use the same sound symbolic associations observed in the previous experiments that targeted Japanese and English speakers. Additionally, we employed a free naming task, instead of a forced-choice task. Variations of forced-choice tasks were used by Kawahara and Kumagai (2019b) and Kawahara et al. (2020, submitted) to investigate sound symbolism in Pokémon types. Although this paradigm is extensively used in sound symbolism research (see Lockwood and Dingemanse (2015) for a review), it may overestimate sound symbolic effects in some settings (Aveyard 2012, Westbury et al. 2018). For this reason, we used a task that allowed participants to create their Pokémon names without many constraints with regard to which phonemes they could use. This task was previously used in Pokémonastics research by Kawahara & Kumagai (2019a) and Godoy et al. (2019), but here it is used to investigate whether different types can also be symbolically signaled.

The goal of Experiment 2 was to test if the association between sibilants and flying Pokémon reported by Kawahara et al. (2020, submitted) would also hold for BP speakers in a more controlled experimental setting, in which participants were directed to pay direct attention to different visual cues. To do so, we used a 2AFC task. This experiment would allow us to investigate if the lack of an effect for sibilants in Experiment 1 was due to methodological differences or to the fact that BP speakers, in general, do not reliably make the flying-sibilant association to the same degree that Japanese and English speakers do.

The experiments reported in this paper were designed to test whether BP speakers use sound symbolism to signal differences in Pokémon type and whether these symbolic patterns are similar to ones employed by Japanese and English speakers. The first experiment suggests that the association between voiced obstruents and evil Pokémon holds in BP, as it does in other languages. This association was observed even in a free-naming task format. The results are in line with the hypothesis that the articulatory/aerodynamic challenge imposed by the production of voiced obstruents could be mapped to negative images (Kawahara 2017), although the precise mechanism that connects articulatory challenges and negative images is yet to be explored in further depth.

On the other hand, neither of our experiments replicated the sibilant-flying association reported by previous studies. Rather than presenting these results as a counter-argument to sound symbolism, we take this pattern as being in line with work that suggests that some sound symbolic association may be language-specific (Imai & Kita 2014; Saji et al. 2013). The results imply that, although sound symbolic patterns with a phonetic basis may generally be universal, as hypothesized by previous studies (e.g., Kawahara 2020b), there are some counter-examples, such as those reported here. The current failure to replicate may be due to an assortment of reasons: the manner of production of sibilants can be different across languages, other sound symbolic associations may be more available in different languages, and/or individual differences affect how sensitive some speakers are to sound symbolic patterns. Testing these possibilities provides an avenue for future empirical research.

Finally, another issue that also merits future attention is the generalizability of our findings. The Pokémonastics paradigm has been used to test sound symbolism in other languages, and is well-suited for cross-linguistic studies. However, it is not suited to explore how sound symbolism works for other vocabulary items outside of the Pokémon world. Currently, there is evidence that the lexicon of a language carries some degree of iconicity. Experimentally, this is attested by the high iconicity ratings some words receive (Winter et al. 2016, Perry et al. 2015) and by the fact that people can correctly pair antonyms in an unfamiliar language (D’Anselmo et al. 2019; Tzeng et al., 2017). Corpus-based research also shows that across thousands of languages, basic vocabulary items (specially property words and body parts) show similar associations with specific sounds (Blasi et al. 2016).

With this said, the sound symbolic patterns that we are studying in the Pokémon world are the same as those that are motivated/observed/studied in the context outside of this world. As reviewed above, the sound symbolic nature of voiced obstruents has been well-known in Japanese. The connection between flying and sibilants was mentioned by Socrates and the Upanishads, long before the Pokémon universe came into being. Thus, while we should exercise some caution in generalizing our current findings beyond the Pokémon universe, we are fairly optimistic that we are tapping into the general linguistic knowledge.

One of the most ubiquitous sound symbolic patterns in languages is the association between the idea of smallness and the high front vowel /i/. This pattern was observed in studies that used Pokémon names and targeted BP (Godoy et al. 2019), and it is also attested in the corpus research mentioned previously as well as by many experimental studies outside the Pokémonastics paradigm (see Shinohara & Kawahara (2010) for a review). “The longer the stronger principle” in the Pokémon universe, which is active across all the languages studied so far, is likely to be a reflection of a sound symbolic principle that is otherwise known as “the iconicity of quantity” (Haiman 1980). Therefore, we believe that the results within the Pokémonastics paradigm are indeed mirroring more general trends in sound symbolism.

To summarize, there is a rapidly growing body of interest in sound symbolism among several different languages, but not much in BP. We hope the current study stimulates further research on sound symbolism in BP and other Portuguese dialects in South America, Asia, Africa and Europe. Comparison of sound symbolism across dialects, and different languages, is an interesting study in itself, but perhaps even more so, because these types of studies also bear upon important issues that crucially underlie the architecture of linguistic systems.

The additional file for this article can be found as follows: