Size-Sound symbolism revisited

Why do we perceive bass voices as ‘‘thick’’? Owing to a ‘‘mediated association’ ’ with ‘‘thick people and animals [who] are usually loud and resonant’’, or owing to some ‘‘subtle inter-sensory quality’ ’ found in thick things and bass voices? The present paper rejects the former possibility and endorses the latter. As to speech-sound symbolism, I account for it with reference to two aspects: phonetic features and precategorial information. I conceive of speech sounds as of bundles of acoustic and articulatory features each of which may have certain (sometimes conflicting) combinational potentials, which may be activated, after the event, by certain meaning components. Speech is transmitted by sound waves; but while speech categories are cons-ciously perceived, the rich precategorial auditory information that transmitted them is excluded from awar-eness. I assume that intuitions regarding perceptual and emotional qualities of speech sounds are prompted by rich precategorial auditory information that subliminally reaches awareness in spite of all. Examining a sample of 136 languages, Russell Ultan (1978) pointed out that in a wide range of cultures high front vowels are typically perceived as small or denoting small things, whereas low back vowels are typically perceived as big or denoting large things. ‘‘Since high front vowels reflect proportionately higher second formant frequencies, [...] there appears a correspondence between a feature of high frequency (=short wavelength in physical terms) an