Apparent evidence for unconscious sound symbolism is probably artifactual: Commentary on Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels and Moors (in press).

Abstract

Sound symbolism refers to the intuition that a word’s sound should match the characteristics of its referents – e.g., kiki should label something spiky – and its prevalence and systematicity provide compelling evidence for an intuitive mapping between linguistic form and meaning. Striking recent work (Hung, Styles, & Hsieh, 2017) suggests that these mappings may have an unconscious basis, such that participants can compute the fit between a word’s sound and an object’s shape when both are masked from awareness. This surprising finding replicated in the pre-registered report by Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels and Moors (2019), with potentially far-reaching implications for the role of awareness in language processing (Hassin, 2013; Rabagliati, Robertson, & Carmel, 2018). However, as I demonstrate, it is an artifact of the stimuli used. Once item effects are accounted for, these data provide no evidence that sound symbolism, and language more generally, can be processed without awareness.

Gaze direction and face orientation modulate perceptual sensitivity to faces under interocular suppression

“…Finally, we should note a potential limitation of our findings: we used the same small set of face stimuli employed in previous studies that examined the eye-contact effect (Akechi et al, 2014;Madipakkam et al, 2015Madipakkam et al, , 2019Seymour et al, 2016;Stein, Senju, et al, 2011). Although it is important to verify that findings obtained with these stimuli hold up when using our more-rigorous methodology, the question of whether the findings would generalise to other face stimuli remains open, and raises the concern that this research domain may be limited by its reliance on a small number of potentially idiosyncratic stimuli (Rabagliati, 2020;Yarkoni, 2019). Future studies should address this issue by including a broader range of stimulus sets.…”