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Experimental Assessment of Sound Symbolism and Evolutionary Considerations Lea De Carolis Experimental assessment of sound symbolism and evolutionary considerations Lea de Carolis To cite this version: Lea de Carolis. Experimental assessment of sound symbolism and evolutionary considerations. Psy- chology. Université de Lyon, 2019. English. NNT : 2019LYSE2039. tel-02921456 HAL Id: tel-02921456 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02921456 Submitted on 25 Aug 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. N° d’ordre NNT : 2019LYSE2039 THESE de DOCTORAT DE L’UNIVERSITÉ DE LYON Opérée au sein de L’UNIVERSITÉ LUMIÈRE LYON 2 École Doctorale : ED 476 Neurosciences et Cognition Discipline : Sciences cognitives Soutenue publiquement le 20 juin 2019, par : Léa De Carolis Experimental assessment of sound symbolism and evolutionary considerations. De la pluralité des principes de justice aux compromis. Devant le jury composé de : Sharon PEPERKAMP, Directrice de Recherche, C.N.R.S., Présidente Ioana CHITORAN, Professeur des universités, Université Paris Diderot, Rapporteure Padraic MONAGHAN, Professeur d’université, Université d’Amsterdam, Rapporteur Luca NOBILE, Maître de conférences, Université de Bourgogne, Examinateur François PELLEGRINO, Directeur de Recherche, C.N.R.S, Co-Directeur de thèse Christophe COUPÉ, Assistant Professor, Université de Hong Kong, Co-Directeur de thèse Contrat de diffusion Ce document est diffusé sous le contrat Creative Commons « Paternité – pas d’utilisation commerciale - pas de modification » : vous êtes libre de le reproduire, de le distribuer et de le communiquer au public à condition d’en mentionner le nom de l’auteur et de ne pas le modifier, le transformer, l’adapter ni l’utiliser à des fins commerciales. Université Lumière Lyon 2 École Doctorale Neurosciences et Cognition (NSCo) Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage (DDL), UMR5596 CNRS THESE Présentée en vue de l'obtention du grade de DOCTEUR EN SCIENCES COGNITIVES DE L'UNIVERSITE DE LYON Discipline : Sciences Cognitives Option Linguistique Experimental assessment of sound symbolism and evolutionary considerations Par Léa De Carolis Réalisée sous la direction de Christophe Coupé et François Pellegrino Date de soutenance prévue le 20 juin 2019 Devant le jury composé de : Ioana CHITORAN Professeure, Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot, Rapporteur Christophe COUPÉ Assistant professor, The University of Hong Kong, Codirecteur Padraic MONAGHAN Professor, University of Lancaster, Rapporteur Luca NOBILE Maître de conférences, Université de Bourgogne, Examinateur François PELLEGRINO Directeur de recherche, CNRS, Codirecteur Sharon PEPERKAMP Directrice de recherche, CNRS, Présidente du jury In memory of Matthias Acknowledgment To begin with, I would like to thank the members of the jury, Ioana Chitoran, Padraic Monaghan, Luca Nobile and Sharon Peperkamp for accepting to evaluate this work and to contribute to its completion. Mes pensées se tournent ensuite vers Christophe à qui j’adresse un grand merci et mon infinie reconnaissance pour avoir cru en moi, en acceptant de m’encadrer d’abord durant mon travail de Master, puis à l’occasion de l’élaboration de cette thèse qui a marqué une période significative de ma vie. Merci pour sa rigueur et la qualité de son encadrement. Merci ensuite à Egidio pour son implication dans ce travail, ses conseils, son soutien et son aide indéfectible, surtout lors des dernières semaines consacrées à ce travail. Merci également à François de nous avoir accordé sa confiance, et pour avoir suivi cette aventure avec un regard bienveillant et des interventions toujours enrichissantes. Merci aussi aux membres du Comité de Suivi Individuel Doctoral, Sharon Peperkamp et Rémy Versace, pour m’avoir offert de leur temps, pour leurs précieux conseils et leurs encouragements. Je voudrais également remercier l’ensemble des membres du laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage et spécialement tous ceux qui m’ont aidé de près ou de loin par maints conseils avisés et prêté main forte tant pour l’élaboration des expérimentations que pour les pré-tests et les passations. Un merci tout particulier à ces collègues (ces mauvais-perdants !), qui sont devenus un peu plus que des collègues et avec qui j’ai passé des moments inoubliables durant ces cinq années passées au laboratoire : Christian, Egidio et Rabia. Merci également à tous les participants aux expériences sans qui ces travaux n’auraient jamais vu le jour, ainsi qu’à Enora pour le travail qu’elle a réalisé durant son stage de Master. Merci encore à tous mes collègues de l’université Savoie Mont-Blanc, et en particulier ceux du bureau 603, qui m’ont accompagnée et soutenue durant cette ultime année, année difficile mais enrichissante où j’ai pu découvrir le monde de l’enseignement supérieur et le plaisir de la transmission. 5 Enfin, je n’oublie pas toutes ces personnes qui ont fait ou qui font ma vie et à qui ce travail doit son existence. Tout d’abord, une pensée respectueuse envers Mme Vergnaud, professeur d’Allemand au lycée : elle m’a marquée par ses encouragements qu’elle m’a prodigués. Puis, il y eut Djena, que je n’oublie pas malgré les aléas de la vie ; je lui serai toujours reconnaissante d’avoir joué un rôle décisif dans mon choix d’étudier les Sciences Cognitives. Ensuite, je pense évidemment à mon binôme des bancs de la fac, Zoé, qui m’a beaucoup apporté et inspiré durant les années de Licence, et qui a représenté pour moi un « pilier », une aide des plus précieuses pendant ces déterminantes premières années d’études supérieures. Je pense également, à mes collègues qui m’ont soutenu quotidiennement durant mes années Master et qui, je ne sais par quel miracle, ont réussi à me faire apprécier le monde des sondages téléphoniques : à vous particulièrement Adrien, Camille, Farida, « Jean-Corentin », Nico, Raphaël, Thomas, Victor et Renaud… merci ! Pour terminer, un grand merci à mes proches : à ma famille et en particulier à mon père, ma mère et mon beau-père, pour leur soutien moral pendant ces longues années d’études universitaires (qui sont passées si vite !) et pour les valeurs qu’ils m’ont inculquées. Merci à mon frère Michaël, personne si chère à mes yeux, et qui m’a toujours épaulée ; merci à Steven pour son soutien à toute épreuve et sa présence irremplaçable ; merci à Marion, mon amie d’enfance avec qui je partage les joies équestres ; merci à Thomas et Florian qui me donnent force et courage chaque jour devant les épreuves de la vie ; merci à Anthony pour son amitié mais aussi son aide précieuse et ses relectures ; et enfin (‘last but not least’ !) merci à Cindy, la meilleure des ‘cat-sitters’ et bien plus encore… À vous tous, je dédie ce travail. 6 Abstract Sound symbolism, or motivation as we will later refer to it, corresponds to the assumption that some words have a natural relation with their significations, instead of an arbitrary one, through their segmental composition. Some evidence stands out from the literature, from cross-linguistic investigations to psycholinguistic experimentations. For example, a closed vowel [i] is more associated to smallness, while an open vowel like [a] is more associated to largeness. This pattern appears in the lexicon of different languages (e.g. Ohala, 1997), as well as in results of associative tasks (Sapir, 1929) with participants speaking different languages and at different life stages. These commonalities (e.g. Iwasaki, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2007) and their earliness (e.g. Ozturk, Krehm, & Vouloumanos, 2013) enable to formulate the hypothesis that motivation may have represented a key-driver in the emergence of language (Imai et al., 2015), by facilitating interactions and agreement between individuals. This thesis offers several methodological contributions to the study of motivated associations. The first study of this thesis aimed at assessing whether animal features (e.g. dangerousness) or biological classes (birds vs. fish, based on Berlin, 1994) would be relevant concepts for highlighting motivated associations, based on the assumption that animals would have represented suitable candidates for the content of early interactions (as potential sources of food and threats). It raised issues regarding methodological settings which led to the second study consisting in comparing different protocols of association tasks that are found across experimentations. Indeed, in the literature, the settings and population vary from one study to another, and it is therefore not possible to determine which one of the two types of contrasts implied in association tasks is determinant for making associations: either the phonetic one or the conceptual one. This second study permitted to appraise the influence of different protocols by controlling for other sources of variation across the tasks. It also highlighted the need to better analyze the cognitive processes involved in motivated associations. This led us to complement our investigation of phonetic and conceptual contrast with a study on the influence of the graphemic shapes of letters, following Cuskley, Simmer and Kirby (2015)’s proposal of an impact of the shapes of letters in the bouba-kiki task. This task is a well-known paradigm in the study of motivated associations, based on associating pseudo-words with round or spiky shapes. Cuskley et al. suggested that a spiky shape would facilitate the processing of a pseudo- word that contains an angular letter such as ‘k’. On our third study, we considered an implicit 7 version of the ‘bouba-kiki’ task, namely a lexical decision task, building on a previous experiment by Westbury (2005). In this experiment, spiky and round frames, in which the linguistic stimuli appeared, seemed to facilitate the processing of pseudo-words according to their segmental composition (e.g.
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