Congruency Effect Between Articulation and Grasping in Native English Speakers

Abstract

Previous studies have shown congruency effects between specific speech articulations and manual grasping actions.

Connection between movements of mouth and hand: Perspectives on development and evolution of speech

“…Similar facilitation effect is observed between backward-directed manual movement and articulation of the rounded back-mid vowel [o] . Moreover, similarly to the articulation-grip effect, this reach effect can be found in Finnish and Czech speakers (Vainio et al, 2015;Tiainen, et al, 2017b).…”

“…The articulation-grip effects introduced above that link certain vowels ([i] and [ɑ]) and consonants ([t] and [k]) to the precision and power grips were originally observed in Finnish speakers (Vainio et al, 2013). However, the same effects have been, so far, also replicated in Czech speakers (Tiainen, Lukavský, Tiippana, Vainio, Šimko, Felisberti, & Vainio, 2017b). The fact that the same effects can be observed in two separate languages that belong to .…”

“…This effect was assumed to be an oral version of the approach-avoidance effect in which a hand is typically moved faster backwards when processing affectively positive stimuli (i.e., it is approached by moving a lever toward oneself) and moved faster forwards when processing affectively negative stimuli (i.e., it is avoided by pushing the lever away from oneself) (e.g., Chen & Bargh, 1999). However, in contrast to the In-Out effect, the vowel-reach effect cannot be observed when articulation requires moving the tongue forwards or backward in order to produce the coronal consonant [t] produced by fronting the tongue tip towards high-front position or the dorsal consonant [k] produced by raising the tongue body towards the back of the velum (Tiainen et al, 2017b). In fact, suggested that the vowel-reach effect is exclusively linked to fronting and backing the tongue body for vowel production rather than shaping the tongue in order to articulate the consonants such as [t] and [k] that require relative forward and backward tongue movements.…”

Connecting directional limb movements to vowel fronting and backing

“…Rather, this directional information appears to be implicitly included in planning tongue movements required for producing specific vowels: the participants were mostly not aware that production of the vowels that they had to pronounce were differentially associated with fronting and backing. In addition, although the effect was originally observed in Finnish speakers [6], it has been, so far, also replicated in Czech speakers [8]. The fact that the same effects can be observed in two separate languages that belong to differentiated language families (Finnish is a Finno-Ugric/Uralic language, and Czech is a Slavic/Indo-European language) suggests that people have an implicit and language-independent tendency to link production of front vowels to forward-directed hand movements and back vowels to backward-directed hand movements.…”

“…The fact that the same effects can be observed in two separate languages that belong to differentiated language families (Finnish is a Finno-Ugric/Uralic language, and Czech is a Slavic/Indo-European language) suggests that people have an implicit and language-independent tendency to link production of front vowels to forward-directed hand movements and back vowels to backward-directed hand movements. Finally, the effect cannot be observed when articulation requires moving the tongue backward or forward in order to produce the dorsal consonant [k] performed by raising the tongue body toward the back of the velum or the coronal consonant [t] produced by fronting the tongue tip toward high-front position [8]. Hence, Vainio et al [7] suggested that this effect is exclusively linked to fronting and backing the tongue body for vowel production rather than shaping the tongue in order to articulate the consonants such as [t] and [k].…”