What can ancient scripts tell us about sound symbolism? (Conference Poster)

<b>Styles SJ (2014)</b>. 'What can ancient scripts tell us about sound symbolism?' Poster presented at IMRF in June 2014, Amsterdam.<br><br><b>Summary. </b>Do English-speakers encode sound/shape symbolism for ‘i’ and ‘u’ because of the shape of the letter-forms? Or do languages adopt writing systems which encode salient patterns of sound/shape symbolism? This paper looks to writing systems from across human history to disentangle the direction of causation, by asking whether writing systems visually communicate salient phonological contrasts like /i/ vs /u/. Stimuli were pairs of written letters representing the phonemes /i/ and /u/ in 56 different writing systems from across the globe, throughout human history. All scripts from ‘The World’s Writing Systems’ (Daniels &amp; Bright, eds, 1996) were included if it was possible to represent /i/ and /u/ in isolation. Exclusions were duplicate letter forms and scripts from the Phoenician family (including Greek, Latin, Runic and Cyrillic), with its familiar ‘I’ and ‘U’ shapes. The scripts range from Cuneiform and Mayan hieroglyphs at the earliest, through Devanagari, Ethiopic and Sineform scripts, to Tibetan, Arabic, Hebrew, and modern scripts like Korean Hankul.<br><br><b>Results.</b> When asked which letter in each /i//u/ pair was which, participants consistently performed above chance (accuracy: M=60%, SD=6%; p&gt;.001). This finding indicates that across human history, writing systems have been better-than-chance at conveying a highly salient speech contrast. While many of the scripts were not matched systematically, more scripts were consistently matched correctly (9), than incorrectly (3). Analysis of the consistently matched stimuli reveals which visual features of a written letter are most predictive of contemporary sound/shape mappings: complexity (i-simple/u-complex), curvature (i-tight/u-loose), angularity (i-accute/u-obtuse), or vertical position of detail (i-high/u-low).