This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 21 shownotes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne, and I’m here today with Suzy Styles to talk about how the sounds of language might be connected to other sensations that you have. Welcome, Suzy!

Suzy: Hi, it’s great to be here!

Lauren: It’s so exciting to have you on the podcast. I should just say, straight up, we are doing some research together, which we’re gonna talk about during the show, and I always have such a great time chatting to you every time that we’re working that I wanted to share that, as we often like to do in Lingthusiasm, share the chats that we enjoy having so much with everyone else.

Suzy: It’s super exciting to be here, I’m delighted. I enjoy your podcast very much and also our chats together, so it’s great to combine the two!

Lauren: Excellent, that’s what I like to hear. One thing we always like to ask people straight up is: How did you get into linguistics?

Suzy: It’s a bit of an interesting one! I think when I was a small child I was very much interested in language and words, and thought about being a writer but didn’t really see how that was working with my interest in science. So I was sort of pursuing physics and chemistry and literature at the same time, and I couldn’t sort of square the two away together, and when I was getting towards the end of high school I went and took on a research project where I went and worked with a particle accelerator for a month.

Lauren: That is cool.

Suzy: So I was doing sort of nuclear physics of electron spin and all sorts of things like this, and I realised that I was deeply uninterested in the practical aspects of doing physics experiments and ran screaming to the humanities! Where on arriving at the ANU – the Australian National University – I discovered this class that was this, like, scientific approach to the language stuff that I’d always found delightful? So, Introduction to Linguistics? And I just fell in love. I haven’t left since. So that was my grand introduction, it was the language stuff and the people stuff that I’d always found fascinating, but also a more scientific approach to the logic of the stuff that I loved.

Lauren: So was there a week in that class, or was it literally week one where you were like, “This is where I need to be”?

Suzy: I read the prospectus and I was hooked.

Lauren: That’s doubly impressive! In your day job you work at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in the psychology department.

Suzy: Yes.

Lauren: So how did you get from studying undergraduate linguistics to ending up in a psych department?

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles

Most of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: there’s no particular reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of sounds in the word “cat”, and indeed other languages have different words for the same animal. But sometimes it may not be so arbitrary. Take these two shapes: a sharp, spiky 🗯 and a soft, rounded 💭 and these two names: “bouba” and “kiki”. If you had to assign one name to each shape, which would you pick?

(Here’s a pause to let you think about it.)

If you said that the spiky shape was kiki and the round shape was bouba, you’re like 90% of English speakers who answer this question. But does this work the same way for speakers of other languages? What about languages that don’t have a /b/ or a /k/ sound, or that have other features, like tone?

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your host Lauren Gawne talks with guest linguist Dr Suzy Styles about how language interacts with your other senses like vision and touch, and doing research across different cultures and languages. Suzy is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and runs the BLIP (Brain Language Intersensory Processing) lab.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

This month’s bonus episode on Patreon is about forensic linguistics. Gretchen and Lauren discuss the reasons why you might see a linguist in a courtroom, and whether Gretchen could write a note and convince people it was from Lauren. The least crime-filled crime podcast episode you’ll ever listen to!

We also announced two new Patreon funding goals, the first ($2,000) is to film our first video episode, taking a look at gesture. The second ($2,500) is to film at least one video interview discussing signed languages with a deaf linguist. We’re excited by the possibility of making these video episodes about linguistic topics that are a bit hard to convey in audio-only form!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• The bouba/kiki effect on Wikipedia
• The problems with doing research only on WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic people
• BLIP lab
• Ković V, Sučević J & Styles SJ (2017). To call a cloud ‘cirrus’: Sound symbolism in names for categories or items. PeerJ, 5(e3466), 1-18. Open Access: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3466
  
• Shang N & Styles SJ (2017). Is a high tone pointy? Degree of pitch-change in lexical tone predicts of sound-to-shape correspondences in Chinese bilinguals. Frontiers. 8(2139), 1-13. Open Access: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02139
  
• When does maluma/takete fail? Journal article
• When does maluma/takete fail? Superlinguo summary
• An article about the Syuba language
• The most common speech sounds across languages
  
• 3D-printed “cloud” and “spike” models that Lauren and Suzy used to do the bouba/kiki test
  
• Lingthusiasm episode 6: Sounds you can’t hear for more about how babies learn sounds and episode 17: Vowel gymnastics for more about how vowels work in different languages

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Emily Gref, our production assistant is Celine Yoon, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).