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How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: an experimental study with nonce words

  • Gakuji Kumagai ORCID logo and Shigeto Kawahara
Published/Copyright: October 3, 2022
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 8 Issue 1

Abstract

Sound symbolism, systematic and iconic relationships between sounds and meanings, is now a topic that is very actively explored by linguists, psychologists and cognitive scientists. As a new research strategy to study the nature of sound symbolic connections across different languages, a number of scholars have started using Pokémon names, a research paradigm that is now dubbed “Pokémonastics.” The previous Pokémonastics studies have experimentally explored how the evolution status is symbolically expressed by native speakers of English, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese. Building on these studies, the current experiment examined the sound symbolic knowledge of Russian speakers, and found that they are more likely to associate large, post-evolution Pokémon characters with names containing voiced obstruents than with names containing voiceless obstruents, and that they are also more likely to associate post-evolution characters with names containing [a] than with names containing [i]. The experiment also revealed that Russian speakers are less likely to associate post-evolution characters with names having labial consonants than with names having coronal or dorsal consonants. Overall, the current results show that Russian speakers generally have knowledge of sound symbolic associations that is similar to that of English, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese speakers, suggesting that some sound symbolic patterns hold robustly across multiple languages.

Keywords: place of articulation; Pokémon; Russian; sound symbolism; voicing
Corresponding author: Shigeto Kawahara, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan, E-mail:

We are grateful to Kimi Akita, Donna Erickson, Maria Gouskova, Jaye Padgett, Mayuki Matsui, Naoya Watabe, the audience at Tokyo Circle of Phonologists (TCP), two anonymous reviewers and the area editor Mie Hiramoto for their comments on previous versions of the paper. Also thanks to Zhenik Barsegyan who helped us design the experiment. All remaining errors are ours.

Funding source: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Award Identifier / Grant number: 19K13164

  1. Author contributions: The first author conceived, designed and executed the experiment with the help of a native speaker consultant. The second author discussed the overall experimental design and wrote up the first draft of the manuscript. The first author extensively revised the manuscript. Both authors contributed to the revisions of the paper as well as the analyses of the data.

  2. Research funding: This project is supported by the JSPS grant #19K13164 to the first author.

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0101).

Received: 2021-07-08
Accepted: 2021-11-05
Published Online: 2022-10-03

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2022
  4. Research Articles
  5. Perceptual similarity is not all: online perception of English coda stops by Korean listeners
  6. How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: an experimental study with nonce words
  7. Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues
  8. Phonetic change over the career: a case study
  9. Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations
  10. The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
  11. Length, position, and functions of inter-clausal Chinese–English code-switching in a bilingual novel
  12. Discourse connectives and their arguments: an experiment on anaphoricity in German
  13. Modeling (im)precision in context
  14. The landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German
  15. Introducing Construction Semantics (CxS): a frame-semantic extension of Construction Grammar and constructicography
  16. Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world
  17. A multivariate analysis of causative do and causative make in Middle English
  18. Unstressed versus stressed German additive auch – what determines a speaker’s choice?
  19. Metaphors are embodied otherwise they would not be metaphors
  20. A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon
  21. Accounting for the relationship between lexical prevalence and acquisition with Bayesian networks and population dynamics
  22. L2 motivation and willingness to communicate: a moderated mediation model of psychological shyness
  23. Why are multiword units hard to acquire for late L2 learners? Insights from cognitive science on adult learning, processing, and retrieval
  24. Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English
  25. The Manchester Voices Accent Van: taking sociolinguistic data collection on the road
  26. Interpreting the order of operations in a sociophonetic analysis
  27. Individual variation in performing reading-aloud speech among deaf speakers
  28. Generating hypotheses for alternations at low and intermediate levels of schematicity. The use of Memory-based Learning
  29. How can complex graphemes be identified in German?
  30. The Menzerath-Altmann law on the clause level in English texts
  31. A cognitive semantic analysis of ‘eat’ verb usages in Bangla
  32. Metonymy in the Korean internally headed relative clause construction
  33. Corpus linguistic and experimental studies on the meaning-preserving hypothesis in Indonesian voice alternations
  34. Monomodal and multimodal metaphors in editorial cartoons on the coronavirus by Jordanian cartoonists
  35. Corrigendum
  36. Corrigendum to: repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0101
Keywords for this article
place of articulation; Pokémon; Russian; sound symbolism; voicing

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2022
  4. Research Articles
  5. Perceptual similarity is not all: online perception of English coda stops by Korean listeners
  6. How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: an experimental study with nonce words
  7. Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues
  8. Phonetic change over the career: a case study
  9. Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations
  10. The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
  11. Length, position, and functions of inter-clausal Chinese–English code-switching in a bilingual novel
  12. Discourse connectives and their arguments: an experiment on anaphoricity in German
  13. Modeling (im)precision in context
  14. The landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German
  15. Introducing Construction Semantics (CxS): a frame-semantic extension of Construction Grammar and constructicography
  16. Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world
  17. A multivariate analysis of causative do and causative make in Middle English
  18. Unstressed versus stressed German additive auch – what determines a speaker’s choice?
  19. Metaphors are embodied otherwise they would not be metaphors
  20. A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon
  21. Accounting for the relationship between lexical prevalence and acquisition with Bayesian networks and population dynamics
  22. L2 motivation and willingness to communicate: a moderated mediation model of psychological shyness
  23. Why are multiword units hard to acquire for late L2 learners? Insights from cognitive science on adult learning, processing, and retrieval
  24. Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English
  25. The Manchester Voices Accent Van: taking sociolinguistic data collection on the road
  26. Interpreting the order of operations in a sociophonetic analysis
  27. Individual variation in performing reading-aloud speech among deaf speakers
  28. Generating hypotheses for alternations at low and intermediate levels of schematicity. The use of Memory-based Learning
  29. How can complex graphemes be identified in German?
  30. The Menzerath-Altmann law on the clause level in English texts
  31. A cognitive semantic analysis of ‘eat’ verb usages in Bangla
  32. Metonymy in the Korean internally headed relative clause construction
  33. Corpus linguistic and experimental studies on the meaning-preserving hypothesis in Indonesian voice alternations
  34. Monomodal and multimodal metaphors in editorial cartoons on the coronavirus by Jordanian cartoonists
  35. Corrigendum
  36. Corrigendum to: repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
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