Abstract
Although a considerable amount of attention has been devoted to the study of different properties of sound symbolic expressions in various languages, very little attention has been paid to the study of lexical mimesis in a comparative, cross-linguistic perspective. As expressions connected to extra-linguistic sounds by means of perceived intentional similarity, sound-symbolic lexical items are not considered fully arbitrary.
The present research is based on the assumption that if the relationship between these expressions and the sounds they represent is indeed motivated by similarity, the meaning of these lexical items should be to a certain extent recognizable to speakers of different languages, regardless their native language. To investigate speaker's ability to recognize a sound symbolic expression from another language, an experiment have been conducted on speakers of English and Czech.
The experiment comprises a variety of tasks which involve matching sets of selected pictures to sound symbolic expressions (these are presented in several ways). This experiment should show how the sound symbolic expressions are recognized in a group of speakers of a particular language and it should also give us the opportunity to compare recognition rates of sound symbolic expressions by native speakers and speakers of a different language.