Abstract
We associate shapes and sounds with the psychological concept such as the impression (e.g. size and sharpness). This effect is known as Bouba-Kiki effect (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). Similarly, this sound symbolic effect associates perceptual qualities in vision or haptics and phonemes in Japanese onomatopoeia (Hamano, 1998; Watanabe, et al., 2011). Japanese onomatopoeia has a large vocabulary and is able to express a subtle difference in our material perception. Here, we investigated that the relationship between perceptual surface qualities (e.g. "glossiness", "roughness", "naturalness", etc.) and distinctive features of Japanese onomatopoeia (e.g. "voiced", "continuant", "nasal", "plosive", etc.). 1946 images were used as stimuli selected and trimmed from the Flickr Material Database (Sharan et al., 2014). Observers viewed an image on the calibrated LCD display and rated the surface quality for the given images using 14 adjective pairs based on previous studies (Fleming et al., 2013; Nagai et al., 2015). Moreover, observers described its image impression in Japanese onomatopoeias. We analyzed the correlation between ratings for the 14 surface quality scales and 11 distinctive features (Jakobson et al., 1951) converted from the Japanese onomatopoeias. As a result, surface qualities such as glossiness, roughness, hardness, were highly correlated with distinctive features such as continuant, voiced, affricative. In contrast, other surface qualities such as viscosity, luxury, and naturalness showed less or no correlation with any distinctive features. This result suggests that basic surface qualities like glossiness or roughness are linked to sounds of the onomatopoeias in a similar way as in Bouba-kiki effect, implying that there might exist universality in the relationship between material perception and distinctive features regardless of the linguistic background.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017