AAAI 2026technical0 citations

Do Language Models Associate Sound with Meaning? A Multimodal Study of Sound Symbolism

Jinhong Jeong, Sunghyun Lee, Jaeyoung Lee, Seonah Han, Youngjae Yu

Abstract

Sound symbolism is a linguistic concept that refers to non-arbitrary associations between phonetic forms and their meanings. We suggest that this can be a compelling probe into how Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) interpret auditory information in human languages. We investigate MLLMs

BibTeX
@inproceedings{aaai2026_dolanguagemodels,
  title = {Do Language Models Associate Sound with Meaning? A Multimodal Study of Sound Symbolism},
  author = {Jinhong Jeong and Sunghyun Lee and Jaeyoung Lee and Seonah Han and Youngjae Yu},
  booktitle = {AAAI 2026},
  year = {2026}
}
Do Language Models Associate Sound with Meaning? A Multimodal Study of Sound Symbolism · AAAI 2026