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This paper investigates the presence of sound symbolism in English by examining the semantic signals carried by individual letter-phonemes. The authors used a minimal-pair paradigm with 220 pairwise letter contrasts and found that large language models consistently recover phoneme-meaning associations across nine perceptual dimensions. These associations are predicted by articulatory-phonetic features and confirmed by behavioral data, suggesting that sound-meaning iconicity is a structured property of phonology.
LLMs can extract consistent, multidimensional semantic information directly from the phonological structure of language, revealing a non-arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning.
A foundational assumption in linguistics holds that the relationship between a word's sound and its meaning is arbitrary. Accumulating evidence from sound symbolism challenges this view, yet no study has systematically mapped the multidimensional semantic profile of every phonological unit within a language. Here we show that individual letter-phonemes in English carry structured, multidimensional semantic signals. Using a minimal-pair paradigm spanning all 220 pairwise letter contrasts, three large language models independently recover consistent phoneme-meaning associations across nine perceptual dimensions. These associations are systematically predicted by articulatory-phonetic features, with manner and place of articulation mapping onto distinct semantic dimensions. Behavioral data from English speakers confirm these patterns at rates well above chance (80.8%), and preliminary cross-linguistic evidence from five typologically diverse languages suggests that core mappings generalize beyond English. Our findings indicate that sound-meaning iconicity is not an occasional curiosity but a pervasive, structured property of the phonological signal, one so systematic that large language models recover it when given only text input, without exposure to speech or articulation during the task.
