Specifically a link between sounds and perception of size—appeared to me for the first time in Steven Pinker's Language Instinct.Some vowels are high in phonetic terminology.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (unofficially—though commonly—abbreviated IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of oral language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators. Pullum and Ladusaw list a variety of names in use for IPA symbols, both current and retired, in addition to names of many other non-IPA phonetic symbols. Their collection is extensive enough that the Unicode Consortium used it in the development of Unicode. phonetic transcription-a transcription intended to represent each distinct speech sound with a separate symbol. phonetic alphabet, sound alphabet-an alphabet of characters intended to represent specific sounds of speech.  Phonetic symbols. This list includes phonetic symbols for the transcription of English sounds, plus others that are used in this class for transliterating or transcribing various languages, with the articulatory description of the sounds and some extra comments where appropriate. Remember that you need a Unicode-compatible browser to see these symbols correctly. If you're not sure how to produce special symbols in your word processor, you can cut and paste from this page. See the bottom of the page for diacritic marks on vowels. The phonetic symbols (or phonemic notation) used in Teflpedia represent the phonemes of the English language using conventions very similar to those introduced by Alfred Gimson in 1977 for Received Pronunciation and found on several Oxford dictionaries such as Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. In this website (and everywhere else, excepting specialized Linguistic journals or books) the term phonetic symbol refers to what would be strictly called phonemic symbol, i.e. symbols that represent different phonemes. Unicode supports several phonetic scripts and notations through the existing writing systems and the addition of extra blocks with phonetic characters. These phonetic extras are derived of an existing script, usually Latin, Greek or Cyrillic. In Unicode there is no IPA script. Apart from IPA, extensions to the IPA and obsolete and nonstandard IPA symbols, these blocks also contain characters from the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet • PHONETIC SYMBOL (noun). The noun PHONETIC SYMBOL has 1 sense: 1. a written character used in phonetic transcription of represent a particular speech sound. Familiarity information: PHONETIC SYMBOL used as a noun is very rare. Hypernyms (phonetic symbol is a kind of...): character; grapheme; graphic symbol (a written symbol that is used to represent speech). Holonyms (phonetic symbol is a part of...): phonetic transcription (a transcription intended to represent each distinct speech sound with a separate symbol). : of or relating to spoken language, speech sounds, or the science of phonetics. : representing each speech sound with a single symbol. : using a system of written symbols that represent speech sounds in a way that is very close to how they actually sound.  THE idea of phonetic symbolism—specifically a link between sounds and perception of size—appeared to me for the first time in Steven Pinker's Language Instinct. Some vowels are high in phonetic terminology, like [i] (as in sweet).  Phonetic symbols are used to represent, in print, the different sounds that make up words. In this website (and everywhere else, excepting specialized Linguistic journals or books) the term phonetic symbol refers to what would be strictly called phonemic symbol, i.e. symbols that represent different phonemes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet http://www.thefreedictionary.com/phonetic+symbol http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2013/ling115/phonetics.html http://teflpedia.com/Phonetic_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_symbols http://www.audioenglish.org/dictionary/phonetic_symbol.htm http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phonetic http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/10/phonetics http://teflpedia.com/Phonetic_symbol
what is phonetic symbolism