Beyond bouba/kiki: Multidimensional semantic signals are deeply woven into the fabric of natural language

Abstract

A foundational assumption in linguistics holds that the relationship between a word's sound and its meaning is arbitrary. Accumulating evidence from sound symbolism challenges this view, yet no study has systematically mapped the multidimensional semantic profile of every phonological unit within a language. Here we show that individual letter-phonemes in English carry structured, multidimensional semantic signals. Using a minimal-pair paradigm spanning all 220 pairwise letter contrasts, three large language models independently recover consistent phoneme-meaning associations across nine perceptual dimensions. These associations are systematically predicted by articulatory-phonetic features, with manner and place of articulation mapping onto distinct semantic dimensions. Behavioral data from English speakers confirm these patterns at rates well above chance (80.8%), and preliminary cross-linguistic evidence from five typologically diverse languages suggests that core mappings generalize beyond English. Our findings indicate that sound-meaning iconicity is not an occasional curiosity but a pervasive, structured property of the phonological signal, one so systematic that large language models recover it when given only text input, without exposure to speech or articulation during the task.