A LOOK AT A POPULAR PSYCHOLINGUISTIC EXPERIMENT

Abstract

The aim of the following paper is to prove the existence of the connection between sound (phoneme) and meaning. The hypothesis is supported by Ramachandran and Hubbard’s experiment on “bouba“ and “kiki“ (2001) and the scientific research in the field of synesthesia, which probably had played an important role in the evolution of the language. There are two studies included, in which 253 people have participated – the first one is the already popular psycholinguistic experiment on “bouba“ and “kiki“ conducted in Bulgaria, the second one is by the author – the aim of the task is to connect intuitively four words (from not that much popular languages) with their translation in Bulgarian. There is an analysis on a research by the author on lexemes from different languages which have common or similar word formation patterns. The hypothesis about the connection between sound and meaning is being proved by examples in psychology, physics, biology and neuropsychology. Of course, not all words have common or similar word formation patterns, the aim is to depict that non-arbitrary words could be more than it has been presumed.