Exploring sound symbolism in the investigation of speech expressivity

The objective of this paper is to examine specific uses of sound symbolism concerning segmental and prosodic properties. The typology developed by Hilton et al (2004) is taken as reference. The corpus of this work is a poem recorded by a professional actor. A research methodology comprising prosodic perceptual analysis, prosodic acoustic analysis and affective states evaluation tests is proposed. The results indicate the speaking strategies used by the actor have been found to make use of three types of sound symbolism (synesthesic, imitative and metalinguistic). Correlations among acoustic properties, perceived affective states and text meaning production demonstrate productive use of sound symbolism and corroborate the discussion on the direct links between sound and meaning.