Conclusion
Questions have been raised in the academy as to whether sound symbolism and crossmodal correspondences could be used to facilitate learning at different levels. In this working paper, I have introduced the concept of uniskript, a methodology developed by me and my team at the University of the Nations in Kona, designed to generate alphabets that are very easy to learn due to their featural-visual indexicality and sound-shape congruency properties. Uniskript alphabets have been used in a variety of contexts, including the teaching of phonics in literacy programs, remediation programs for struggling readers, second language teaching, heritage language revitalization, among others. Programs have been developed in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Thailand, China and in the US.
I have also discussed shortly the semiotic nature of uniskript, contrasting it with writing systems that are mainly symbolic in nature, arguing that indexicality allows for the developments of alphabets that are easier to learn an require less memorization effort. I have shortly commented on the sound symbolism literature and argued that uniskript glyphs take advantage of sensorial cross-modality, creating alphabets that are highly intuitive.
Finally, I introduced uniskript ESL to provide the reader with an opportunity to familiarize herself with one version of uniskript. One of my hypothesis is that uniskript can be very effective as a tool to teach pronunciation in a second language learning program.
This material is work in progress, submitted as a preprint, so I can get feedback from my colleagues and improve it for future publication. Some of the next steps would be to produce controlled research comparing the performance of subjects learning uniskript with subjects learning a non-congruent shape-based alphabet. We also need longitudinal studies to verify the long-term gains in reading Roman letters for kids exposed to uniskript phonics, and the long-term gains in pronunciation for L2 students exposed to uniskript. I have many questions regarding the nature of the crossmodal correlations, the role of phonology in sound symbolism, how sound symbolism relates to the evolution of language, the role of indexicality and congruency in learning, neurological mappings between manual and articulatory movements, just to list a few. Could uniskript shapes be used as a theoretical language for expressing processes and rules in phonology? I propose that uniskript alphabets can serve as a platform for research to help shed light on many of the questions that still need to be answered or even asked.