Sound Symbolic Patterns in Pokemon Names

This paper presents a case study of sound symbolism, cases in which certain sounds tend to be associated with particular meanings. We used the corpus of all Japanese Pokemon names available as of October 2016. We tested the effects of voiced obstruents, mora counts, and vowel quality on Pokemon characters' size, weight, strength parameters, and evolution levels. We found that the number of voiced obstruents in Pokemon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and general strength parameters, except for speed. We argue that this result is compatible with the frequency code hypothesis of Ohala. The number of moras in Pokemon names correlates positively with size, weight, evolution levels, and all strength parameters. Vowel height is also shown to have an influence on size and weight - Pokemon characters with initial high vowels tend to be smaller and lighter, although the effect size is not very large. Not only does this paper offer a new case study of sound symbolism, it provides evidence that sound symbolism is at work when naming proper nouns. (C) 2018 The Author(s) Published by S. Karger AG, Basel