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Sound Symbolism
Task E - our comments
The perceptual double-take here appears to be related to viewpoint.
An adult is remembering what it was like when he was a child. For the
child sitting under the piano, because he is very close to the strings
of the piano, the noises are likely to be (a) loud and (b) full of resonance,
even when they will seem like clear 'tinkling' noises to others in the
room. The word 'boom' is sound symbolic of this auditory experience
- it is voiced throughout (maximising the resonance in the word) and
has a long vowel and a nasal, suggesting sound length for the piano
notes. Nasals and vowels produced at the back of the mouth (as /u:/
is) are also often associated with indistinctness (cf. 'gloom'). The
words 'tingling strings' also have voiced nasals at the ends of each
of the three syllables.
The repeated high front vowel /ɪ/ is
a short, clear sound and so is the repeated /t/
in the initial consonant cluster - a voiceless stop. These qualities
give rise to the idea of a series of bright, short notes - the kind
of sound associated with the sound symbolic word 'tinkling' which is
phonetically very close to 'tingling' but replaces a voiced nasal with
a voiceless stop . This more distinct perception seems to represent
mainly the view of the adult (except for the /ŋ/ nasal, which is more
'boom-like', so with 'boom' we get the child's viewpoint alone, but
with 'tingling strings' we get a blend of the viewpoint of the adult
looking back and the original perceptual experience of the child.
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