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POKÉMONASTICSSOME NEWPOKÉMONASTICS
EXPERIMENTSS H I G E TO K AWA H A R A
T H E K E I O I N S T I T U T E O F C U LT U R A L A N D L I N G U I S T I CSTUDIESKAWAHARA, NOTO, KUMAGAI (2018)• Pokémonastics: A general research project in which we examine
systematic sound-meaning correspondences (“sound symbolism”)
using Pokémon names.
• Some virtues:– Pokémon provides a universe with the same real-world
attributes across different languages (Shih et al. 2018).
– The universe is reasonably large.
– Each attribute has size, weight, and other quantitativeparameters.
– It is fun (for us, and for students & for children).

KAWAHARA, NOTO & KUMAGAI(2018)IN THE POKÉMON LEXICON• Voiced obstruents are associated with images of largeness,heaviness, higher evolution levels, and higher strength parameters.
• Questions:Japanese children– Are these relationships productive?
– When are they acquired?
– How robust are these across languages?

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POKÉMONASTICS EXPERIMENTS• Visual prompts: pairs of (non-existing) pre- and post-evolution
Pokémon characters. Post-evolution characters were 50% larger.
• Provide two names (e.g. [jasaha] vs. [gebiki]) and ask the participants
to choose which name is better for which Pokémon.

JAPANESE ADULTS (KUMAGAI &KAWAHARA, TO APPEAR)- Not only the effects of voiced obstruents, but also the effects of vowels wereapparent.
- /a/ is more likely to be associated with the post-evolution Pokémon than /i/ or /u/.

STIMULI OF THE CURRENT
EXPERIMENT (BASED ON K&K, T.A.)

PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE• The participants were 24 native speakers of Japanese (6;1-6;11, average 6;7), allfrom Tokyo or surrounding area.
• The experimenter asked if they knew more about Pokémon, and if their
response was negative, the experimenter explained what Pokémon is, including
the fact that when Pokémon characters evolve, they generally become bigger,larger, and stronger.
• We showed the participants a website with many Pokémon pictures, and asked
how many Pokémon characters they can name. This response was coded on a7-point scale.

RESULTS: EXPECTED RESPONSES• Condition (C): Comparison between voiced obstruents vs. voicelessobstruents yielded clearest results.
• Condition (A): [a] was associated with post-evolved characters than [i]was (a la Kumagai & Kawahara, to appear).
/kiiki/vs.
/kaaka//i/vs.
/a//tsuutsu/vs.
/taata//jasaha/vs.
/gebiki//piipin/vs.
/baaban//pumpuu/vs.
/bambaa/

/u/
vs.
/a/

Voiceless obs
vs.
Voiced obs/i/vs.
/a/+voi obs/u/vs.
/a/+voi obs• Condition (B): There was no clear differences between[a] and [u].
• A mystery: Conditions (D) and (E), which tested the combined effects ofvoiced obstruents and vowels, elicited lower expected response ratios
than Condition (C).

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KNOWLEDGE FROM EXPOSURE TO THE
POKÉMON LEXICON?

Brazilian Portuguese

EFFECTS OF WATCHING POKÉMONANIME?

• Brazilian Portuguese does not have many ideophones, at least not
as many as Japanese. Neither has there been many studies on soundsymbolism in BP.
• A free elicitation experiment with native speakers of BrazilianPortuguese (BP) using the Pokémonastics paradigm.

EXPERIMENT• A general question: are speakers of BP sensitive to sound symboliceffects?
• The tv show and Pokémon games in Brazil use English names; it isthus interesting to examine whether sound symbolic effects emerge
when BP speakers use Portuguese to name Pokémon characters.

• Online experiment, the format is very similar to that of Kawahara &Kumagai (2019).
• Participants were presented with a pair of pre- and post- evolution
versions of the Pokémon characters.
• Post-evolution characters were 25% larger.
• They were asked to come up with names for each character.

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EXCLUSION CRITERIARESULTS• Names with foreign-looking orthography (see the Appendix).
• Names with a real Portuguese word or a blend of words (e.g.,“chamorco” (chama = flame; porco = pig/boar).
• Pairs that used Portuguese suffixes and prefixes to express evolution(e.g., -ão and -inho for augmentative and diminutive, respectively).

PrePost• After applying the aforementioned criteria, we excluded data from 70
participants because they had a rate of data exclusion greater than 50%.
• The remaining dataset comprised 2240 names for 1.120 pairs ofPokémon named, created by 71 participants.

CORRELATION WITH FAMILIARITY

Number of voiced
obs
0.61
0.76

Number ofsyllables
2.66
3.13

Stats:
Number of voiced obs: a Poisson regression, glmer(number.obstruents ~ evolution+ (1|participant) + (1|item), data = data,family=poisson(link=log), Chisq=18.384, p <.001
Number of syllables: a Truncated Poisson regression, glmmTMB(number.syllables ~evolution + (1|participant) + (1|item), data = data,family=truncated_poisson),
Chisq=52.573, p < .001

VOWEL QUALITY: INITIAL SYLLABLES
preposta288383↑e181181

i274176↓o214240↑u165142↓[a] and [o]—vowels often considered to be large, those with low F2 (Ohala1994)—are more often used for post-evolution characters.
[i] and [u] (high vowels) are less often used for post-evolution characters (cf. theexisting Japanese Pokémon patterns, Kawahara et al. 2018).

VOWEL QUALITY: STRESSEDSYLLABLES
preposta174236
↑e147
180
↑

i457307↓

SUMMARY• Japanese children are sensitive to the sound symbolic effects of:o177247↑

Non-high vowels are more frequent for post-evolution characters.
High vowels are less frequent for post-evolution characters.

u167152↓– voiced obstruents– [a] as opposed to [i]• BP speakers are sensitive to the sound symbolic effects of:– voiced obstruents– the longer the stronger principle– height-based distinctions• Pokémonastics is a good experimental paradigm. More than 140 BP
participants; Japanese children enjoyed it a lot too.

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APPENDIX: FOREIGN-LIKE BPRESPONSES

Thank you

• Names with double vowels in any position (e.g., “Bumee”)• Names with an ending with any consonant but /s/, /r/, /m/, /n/ and /x/, which are the ones usedin word offset in Brazilian Portuguese• Names with consonant clusters that violates Brazilian Portuguese phonotactics (e.g., ‘schr’ in“Schrorox”).
• Names using “w” in any position because is was not possible to decide whether thepronunciation would be /w/ or /v/ (both mappings are common in Portuguese). This case did
not violate phonotatics most of the time, but we decided to be conservative and exclude thesecases because the ocurrence of /v/ is one of our dependent variable (number of voicedobstruents).

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