A Verification of Visualization Ability of Onomatopoeia Thesaurus Map for Sound-Symbolism on Japanese Vowels

摘要

Human Robot Interaction explores smooth communication between human being and machines. The communication in Japanese often uses onomatopoeia. That can easily express features of sound, atmosphere of movement and so on. It has also the characteristic that is called sound symbolism. Sound symbolism is a property that a specific sound makes people imagine a specific impression. Urata et al. focused on sound symbolism and proposed an onomatopoeia thesaurus map. The thesaurus map attempted to visualize semantic similarity between onomatopoeias. However, visualization ability of the map has not been evaluated sufficiently. In this paper, we verified the visualization ability of the map. We formulated a hypothesis based on sound symbolism about Japanese vowels. The experiment evaluated the hypothesis. As the result of the experiment, it was confirmed that the map can express a part of the hypotheses. On the other hand, a part of the result was different from the hypothesis. This paper discussed the experimental result.