Making Meaning with Sound
Have you ever wondered what the very first spoken words sounded like? These original words would have been uttered for the first time by our ancient ancestors, perhaps millions of years ago, before there were any conventions in place for connecting particular sounds with meanings. Recent research in cognitive science shows that the voice is a powerful tool for expressing meaning across linguistic boundaries. Not only are people virtuosos at imitating the sounds that we hear around us, we are also able to use our voice to conjure wide-ranging concepts related to time, space, motion, shape, texture, and much else.
In this workshop, participants explored the human ability to make meaning with the sound of our voice—which is one of our species’ most distinguishing talents. Over the 90-minute session, participants listened to sounds, played ‘vocal’ charades, guessed the meanings of words from unknown languages, and learnt about the latest scientific research on sound symbolism.
About the Linguist
Aleksandra Ćwiek has earned her BA and MA from Bielefeld University, where her area of specialisation was acoustic phonetics. She did her PhD from Humboldt University of Berlin, where she worked at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics on iconicity in language. As of late 2022, she will start a postdoctoral fellowship at Radboud University, where she will continue her research on iconicity and multimodality. Ćwiek’s research interests are iconicity, sound symbolism, multimodality, cognition, and language evolution.
About the Cognitive Scientist
Marcus Perlman is a lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. He earned his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and did postdoctoral research at the Gorilla Foundation, the University of California, Merced, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. His research examines the evolution of language, with a special interest in iconicity in speech, vocalisation, and gesture. He also studies the vocal behaviour and gesturing of great apes.
