Onomatopoeias, brain scans, and a trip to Ecuador—the Linguistics Department’s latest research findings might surprise you.
Buzz! Swish! Bhux! English speakers will probably recognize the first two onomatopoeic words in this list, and Kichwa speakers in Pastaza, Ecuador, use the third word to imitate a freshwater dolphin bursting out of water. All three qualify as ideophones—words that mimic sensory experiences. Fascinating ideophones like bhux appear frequently in the Kichwa language, but unfortunately, linguistic professionals and students alike have often considered ideophones to be illegitimate words. They argue that ideophones only imitate sounds and sensory experiences but don’t actually carry meaning that the brain can interpret and respond to like nouns, adjectives, and other types of words do.
In a recently published research article, Professor Janis Nuckolls (Morphology, Semantics), Linguistics Department Chair Dan Dewey (Second Language Acquisition and Teaching), and Assistant Professor Jeff Green (Neurolinguistics, Psycholinguistics) refuted this idea and defended the legitimacy of ideophones after conducting research with Kichwa speakers in Pastaza. Their article provides groundbreaking neurolinguistic insight into the function of ideophones, and it constitutes the first peer-reviewed study from BYU to use functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology.
Pastaza natives live in a rich rainforest ecosystem, and ideophones represent a huge part of the language they use to communicate about their surroundings. Through fNIRS, which utilizes light to identify activated parts of the brain, Nuckolls, Dewey, and Green measured responses in the brains of Kichwa speakers when listening to isolated examples of three different semantic classes of ideophones—visual, motion, and sound. Nuckolls had developed this ideophone classification system as part of her own research, which spans over 30 years of studying the Kichwa language and includes an audiovisual corpus of common Kichwa ideophones.
The results of the fNIRS study provided striking evidence that ideophones have a connection to the parts of the brain that interpret sensory experiences. Green says, “We were able to see that these different categories of ideophones were activating different parts of the brain, and the parts of the brain they were activating correspond to the types of meanings that they have.” In fact, the data indicated that semantic categories of ideophones are even more complex than Nuckolls had realized. For example, she initially thought that sound ideophones would only activate sound, motion, and contact reactions in the brain—but certain sound ideophones actually elicited emotional and visual reactions as well.
Dewey says, “A lot of people would say you don’t get [semantic meaning] with ideophones, but that’s exactly what we’re showing—that you do. They activate meaning in a similar way.” Similarly, Nuckolls shared her thoughts on the study by saying, “I feel as if we’ve rescued these words from the abyss of irrationality. They’re not nonsense words, they’re not just whimsical or cartoonish . . . these are words that people really use to express something important in their lives.”
If you’re interested in future linguistic research opportunities involving the Kichwa language or fNIRS, reach out to Drs. Nuckolls (janis_nuckolls@byu.edu), Dewey (ddewey@byu.edu), or Green (jjgreen@byu.edu).
Check out their full research article “Neurological evidence for the context-independent multi-sensorial semantics of ideophones in Pastaza Kichwa: an fNIRS study in the Ecuadorian Amazon.”