Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, twenty-four leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. They consider sound-symbolic processes in a wide range of languages from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America.

Beginning with an evocative typology of sound-symbolic processes, they go on to examine not only the well-known areas of study, such as onomatopoeia and size-sound symbolism, but also less frequently discussed topics such as the sound-symbolic value of vocatives and of involuntary noises, and the marginal areas of "conventional sound symbolism," such as phonesthemes.

The book concludes with a series of studies on the biological basis of sound symbolism, and draws comparisons with the communication systems of other species. This is a definitive work on the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. The wide-ranging new research presented here reveals that sound symbolism plays a far more significant role in language than scholarship has hitherto recognized.