Why ‘Tiny’ Sounds Smaller than ‘Huge’

What sized object comes to mind when you hear a made-up word like "teedee?"  Something small or something large?  And does "bouba" sounds round or spiky?  Fascinatingly, research has found that, even across languages, people often assign very similar meanings to certain types of words because of the way they sound.   

Sounds and symbols

This idea of words "sounding" like their meaning is something most people become acquainted with early in life when adults ask children what says "moo" and what says "woof." These words for the noises that animals make are derived from how people perceive the way the noises sound and then try to copy them in speech.  Of course, depending on our language system, we hear these animal noises differently, which is why dogs might say "woof" in English, but "wan wan" in Japanese.  

Such onomatopoeia, or words that mimic something about the thing they describe, is just the tip of the iceberg in modern sound symbolism research, a field which studies the non-arbitrary relationship of sounds to meaning.

Though the idea of words having an inherent sense had been tossed around by philosophers in antiquity who pondered the nature of meaning, a more scientific look at this topic began in the early 20^th century, focusing specifically on the sounds a word contained, rather than the word itself.  Since then, there has been a steady stream of work that has pointed to a link between certain sounds and a person’s perception of the properties of objects, like their size or shape. 

For instance, in an early experimental study by famed anthropological linguist Edward Sapir, made-up words were used to refer to a table.  When told the table was "mal," subjects identified the table as large as opposed to when the table was referred to as "mil," which they associated instead with a small table.   

What was behind this strange pattern?  Sapir hypothesized that words with vowels pronounced using the front part of the tongue, like "ee" (as in "tea"), were associated with smaller sized objects than words with vowels like "oh" or "ah" made more toward the back of the mouth. Since his early work, this vowel-size correlation has been replicated extensively and, moving beyond just size, later studies have tried to tease out both which sounds seem to trigger specific associations and what they seem to symbolize.

For instance, similar experiments...

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