In Experiments 1 and 2, we investigated long-term repetition priming effects in Serbian under crossalphabet and cross-modal conditions. In both experiments, results followed the same pattern: significant priming in all conditions and no significant reduction in priming in the cross-modal as opposed to the cross-alphabet condition. These results are different from those obtained in English (Experiment 3), in which a modality shift led to a reduction in priming. The findings are discussed within a theoretical framework, in which long-term priming is a by-product of learning within the language system. A full list of word stimuli for all three experiments presented in this article can be found at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Köhler's observation that most people match pseudoword "maluma" to curvy objects and "takete" to spiky objects represented the well-known example of sound symbolism-the idea that link between sound and meaning of words was not entirely arbitrary. This study was aimed to examine the existence of sound symbolism in natural language and to consider the potential role of some aspects of experimental design and stimuli features which had not been considered in experimental studies so far. Three experiments were done in order to explore the influence of visual information on language processing. Visual lexical decision task with the sharp-sounding and soft-sounding verbal stimuli presented within the spiky and curvy frames was used. Reaction time analysis in these three experiments highlighted additional aspects of visual and language processing which influence the potential interplay of these two processes. As results revealed, when visual information preceded presentation of verbal material for approximately 1000 ms or when visual and verbal material were presented simultaneously, the processing was being delayed and the interactions of these two processes occurred. The pattern of obtained results gave further support to the idea of sound symbolism as pre-semantic phenomenon and the hypothesis that the effect emerged from very early stages of language processing.

Since described by Köhler more than half a century ago, phonetic–iconic correspondences have been demonstrated in a series of studies showing remarkable consistency in matches of pseudowords containing specific types of phonemes (e.g., Maluma or Takete) with rounded and angular shapes. If the effect found in these experiments reveals something about processes involved in natural language interpretation, we should expect similar association between phonological properties of objects’ labels and their perceptual properties to exist in natural language as well. However, results of the studies testing this effect in natural language are rather inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory. The aim of the present study was to test whether the distribution of phonemes and consonant-vowel patterns, previously found in pseudowords participants produced for the abstract visual patterns (Jankovic and Markovic, 2000, Perception 29 ECVP Abstract Supplement), could be found in the words of natural language. For 1066 nouns denoting round and angular shapes extracted from the Corpus of Serbian Language, distribution of phonemes and consonant-vowel patterns were analyzed. Results showed that words of Serbian language denoting sharp and rounded objects show similar patterns of phoneme and consonant-vowel distributions as those found in pseudowords produced for sharp and rounded visual stimuli, and therefore provide further evidence for cross-modal correspondences in natural language. These findings were discussed in the light of the role crossmodal correspondences can have in the natural language acquisition.

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Crossmodal correspondences have been widely demonstrated, although mechanisms that stand behind the phenomenon have not been fully established yet. According to the Evaluative similarity hypothesis crossmodal correspondences are influenced by evaluative (affective) similarity of stimuli from different sensory modalities (Jankovic, 2010, Journal of Vision 10(7), 859). From this view, detection of similar evaluative information in stimulation from different sensory modalities facilitates crossmodal correspondences and multisensory integration. The aim of this study was to explore the evaluative similarity hypothesis of crossmodal correspondences in children. In Experiment 1 two groups of participants (nine- and thirteen-year-olds) were asked to make explicit matches between presented auditory stimuli (1 s long sound clips) and abstract visual patterns. In Experiment 2 the same participants judged abstract visual patterns and auditory stimuli on the set of evaluative attributes measuring affective valence and arousal. The results showed that crossmodal correspondences are mostly influenced by evaluative similarity of visual and auditory stimuli in both age groups. The most frequently matched were visual and auditory stimuli congruent in both valence and arousal, followed by stimuli congruent in valence, and finally stimuli congruent in arousal. Evaluatively incongruent stimuli demonstrated low crossmodal associations especially in older group.