How to study the semiotic and semantics of sounds?

 

What does it mean to say that a sound has meaning? This certainly is a difficult question and there are probably different answers depending upon the level of analysis and the materials being considered. Meaning in language is based on double articulation: linguistic sounds do not have meaning by themselves but in reference to an extra-designated space. Consequently, the general working hypothesis that we would like to test is that there are at least two different processes: the perception of the relevant features of sounds (based upon sensory and perceptive processes) that allow contact with a mental representation, and the categorisation of these relevant features (cognitive process) that allow access to meaning. The objective of the proposed research is to try to specify the content of mental representation (that are probably different for words and impact sounds, for instance) and to characterize the categorisation processes necessary to decide that “Table” is a word but ‘Tible” is not, or that somebody knocked at the door or walked on a wooden floor.