抄録
Offer Organization: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, System Name: Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research, Fund Type: -, Overall Grant Amount: - (direct: 2900000, indirect: 870000)
To identify active brain regions representing subjective impression expressed by Japanese onomatopoeias based on sound symbolism, we performed fMRI measurements in response to auditory and visual presentations of onomatopoeias. Although we obtained typical patterns of brain activities when onomatopoeias were presented, we did not detect statistically significant differences in fMRI signals between onomatopoeias and standard adjectives and/or adverbs. This result suggests that each onomatopoeia has acquired its own niche in the semantic space spanned by Japanese vocabularies at the same level of adjectives and adverbs, and hence does not have a special characteristic other than the fact that it has emerged from sound symbolism.