Dashing is faster than lumbering by sound: Speed sound symbolism in English motion verbs

Psychological experiments have established sound symbolic associations between fast/slow speed and various phonemes or phonetic features in our perception. These associations were also occasionally attested cross-linguistically in words for “fast” and “slow”. This study aims to determine whether speed sound symbolism resides extensively in English motion verbs (e.g., dash, lumber), words presumed to be more likely to exhibit speed sound symbolism. A rating questionnaire was used to obtain each verb’s implied speed. An extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) model revealed that phoneme frequency alone can account for 14.36% of semantic variation along the speed dimension, which is a modest but genuine effect. Phonemes /m/, /ʃ/, /t͡ʃ/ and /ɑ/ emerged as important predictors of speed ratings, with /m/ and /ɑ/ associated with slowness while /ʃ/ and /t͡ʃ/ with fastness. Our findings provided further evidence for the existence of sound symbolism in natural languages. Moreover, the sound-and-meaning matching patterns in English generally agree with patterns identified by previous behavioral tasks, suggesting that the way our language is constructed is affected by, or at least coincides with, speakers’ perception of speech sounds. The possible mechanisms underlying speed sound symbolism and its implications on language evolution and the concept of phonestheme are also discussed.