Can Item Effects Explain Away the Evidence for Unconscious Sound Symbolism? An Adversarial Commentary on Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels, and Moors (2019)

Abstract

Can item effects explain away the evidence for unconscious sound symbolism? An adversarial commentary on Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels and Moors (2019) 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

The benefits of adversarial collaboration for commentaries

“…In the latter case, it ideally also explains how the matter could be resolved, for instance, by agreeing on a critical experiment, which, in turn, could be jointly pursued (see refs. 4,5 for concrete examples).…”