Clang, chitter, crunch : perceptual organisation of onomatopoeia

A method has been developed that utilizes a sound-sorting and labeling procedure, with correspondence analysis of participant-generated descriptive terms, to elicit perceptual categories of sound. Unlike many other methods for identifying perceptual categories, this approach allows for the interpretation of participant categorization without the researcher prescribing descriptive terms. The work has allowed robust sound taxonomies to be created, which give insight into categorical auditory processing of everyday sounds by humans. Work on common audio search terms has highlighted that onomatopoeia are an important group that has been largely overlooked in quotidian sound studies. These are words for which the meaning of the word maps onto the sound of the utterance, and are an example of sound symbolism where there is a non-arbitrary link between the form and the meaning of word. Early analysis of the data suggests that people do draw on sound symbolism to carry out the categorization, but that in addition they also draw similarities between the inferred sound sources, such as organic versus non-organic