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

ArXi:2603.17306v2 Announce Type: replace 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.