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FEATURED ARTICLE Sounds Full of Meaning and the Evolution of Language1 Susanne Fuchs and Aleksandra Ćwiek Imagine that you are a child again and smell fresh- baked cake when you come home after school. Maybe it’s your grandmother’s apple cake or your neighbor’s famous cheesecake. You audibly inhale through the nose and your eyes roll because the cake smells deli- cious. You open the door. There is a piece waiting for you right there, still warm and fresh from the oven! You take a bite. Now, with this memory in place, how could you let someone experience it with you? You could try describing the taste with words. Maybe the cake is mild, maybe zesty, or maybe it’s just delightful! However, it might be difficult to describe a sensory experience like that using conventional language. A different way to describe the experience would be to use depictive rather than descriptive communication. You might do a breathy grunt followed by a long /m/. There can be yumminess all over your body, too: hands touching the smacking lips, eyes and eyebrows frowned in the sense of pleasure. An m-sound might be meaning- less without the additional information of the situation, but producing “mmm” with the smell of one’s favorite cake in mind clearly delivers the meaning of pleasure. The intent of this article is to show that speech sounds can be much more than mere meaning-distinguishing units. Through established cross-modal correspon- dences with other sensory dimensions, human vocalizations can bear meaning that translates to a real-world context. We argue that cross-modal corre- spondences and the iconic resemblance between the audible form of spoken language and other sensory information create meaning and were essential to get language off the ground at its dawn. In this sense, the world of sounds can be full of meaning. 1 This paper is dedicated to Mary Wünsch. ©2022 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2022.18.2.43 The World of Sounds Traditionally, a speech sound (or phoneme in linguistic terms) is the smallest meaning-distinguishing unit of speech. For example, the difference between “hit”/hɪt/ and “hat” /hæt/ is but one vowel sound. Sounds them- selves are considered to have no meaning, and they are defined by the conventions of a language. English “hat” and Spanish “sombrero” both refer to an object covering the head but include different sounds. However, some sounds are very stable across languages. We can observe astonishing examples of sounds bearing meaning in sound symbolism. But what does this mean? Let us look at a different example of a minimal pair than the two words hit and hat. Compare “zig”/zɪɡ/ and “zag”/zæɡ/. The difference in vowels is the same as in hit versus hat, but what about the difference in meaning? “Zigzag” paints a picture in our heads of a back-and-forth movement. In this example, /ɪ/ versus /æ/ evoke a feeling of an opposite direction of movement. The word zigzag is iconic; it creates a mapping between aspects of the acous- tic signal and features of the action or visual image. The most comprehensive study on sound symbolism that we are aware of is the one published by Blasi et al. (2016), who investigated almost 4,300 languages. These are about two-thirds of all existing languages! The authors used a list of 40 words from the Swadesh (1955) list, which encom- passes a total of 100 concepts that are least likely to be borrowed from other languages. The Swadesh list was cre- ated to compare vocabularies cross-linguistically, aiming toward a better understanding of concept stability and change across language histories. Those concepts include body parts (e.g., eye, lips, breast), pronouns (e.g., I, we, you), and motion verbs (e.g., swim, walk), among others. Blasi et al. (2016) analyzed the relationship between the occurrence or avoidance of sounds within those concepts Volume 18, issue 2 | Summer 2022 • Acoustics Today 43