Theoretical accounts as well as behavioral studies reporting animacy effects offer inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. A possible explanation for these inconsistencies may be inadvertent biases in the stimuli selected for test – with category-specific effects driven by characteristics of test stimuli other than animacy per se. In this study, we pit animacy against feature structure (intra-item variability), in a picture-word matching task. For unimpaired adults, regardless of whether objects were from animate (mammals; insects) or inanimate (clothes; musical instruments) superordinate categories, participants were faster to match basic level labels with objects from categories with low intra-item variability (mammals; clothes) than from categories with high intra-item variability (insects; instruments). Thus, pitting animacy against variability allowed us to clarify that observable differences in processing speed between animals and instruments are systematically driven by the intra-item variability of the superordinate categories, and not by animacy itself.

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.

Phonological awareness is the ability to correctly recognize and manipulate phonological structures. The role of phonological awareness in reading development has become evident in behavioral research showing that it is inherently tied to measures of phonological processing and reading ability. This has also been shown with ERP research that examined how phonological processing training can benefit reading skills. However, there have not been many attempts to systematically review how phonological awareness itself is developed neurocognitively. In the present review, we screened 224 papers and systematically reviewed 40 papers that have explored phonological awareness and phonological processing using ERP methodology with both typically developing and children with reading problems. This review highlights ERP components that can be used as neurocognitive predictors of early developmental dyslexia and reading disorders in young children. Additionally, we have presented how phonological processing is developed neurocognitively throughout childhood, as well as which phonological tasks can be used to predict the development of phonological awareness prior to developing reading skills. Neurocognitive measures of early phonological processing can serve as supplemental diagnostic sources to behavioral measures of reading abilities because they show different aspects of phonological sensitivity when compared to behavioral measures.