Sound-symbolism effects in the absence of awareness. A replication study

Abstract

People have been shown to link particular sounds with particular shapes. For instance, the round-sounding non-word bouba tends to be associated with curved shapes, whereas the sharp-sounding non-word kiki is deemed to be related to angular shapes. This tendency of people to associate sounds and shapes has been observed across different languages. In the present study, we re-examined the claim of Hung, Styles, and Hsieh (2017) that such sound-shape mappings can occur before becoming aware of the visual stimuli. More precisely, we replicated their first experiment in which congruent and incongruent stimuli (e.g., bouba presented in a round or an angular shape, respectively) were rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression. The results showed that congruent combinations, on average, broke suppression faster than incongruent stimuli, thus providing converging evidence for Hung and colleagues’ assertions. Collectively, these findings now provide a solid basis from which to explore the boundary conditions of the effect.

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

“…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.…”

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

“…All code used in the present analyses has been made publicly available via OSF and can be accessed at https:// osf.io/tva8j/. Data used in the analyses were from the study by Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels, and Moors (2019) and can be found at https://osf.io/ kqwcg/. The design and analysis plans for the present study were not preregistered.…”

“…One eye is shown a rapidly changing pattern that dominates awareness and can mask the stimulus that is shown to the other eye, which in this paradigm is either a puffy or a spiky shape with either the words kiki or bubu printed inside. When the pronunciation of the word mismatched the shape of the image, both the original study (Hung et al, 2017) and the replication study (Heyman et al, 2019) found that stimuli were suppressed from awareness for longer (i.e., breakthrough times were longer for incongruent stimuli).…”

“…However, Figures 1c and 1d show that the reported effect of congruency does not in fact provide strong evidence for a general sound-symbolism effect. Participants in Hung et al's (2017) and Heyman et al's (2019) studies saw only the four stimuli described above, and when the data are broken down by stimulus, a different pattern emerges for each pair of stimuli.…”

“…As a result, any idiosyncratic effects of the stimuli on suppression times would be repeatedly measured in the resulting data. Since only two pairs of stimuli were used in Heyman et al's (2019) study, it would not be possible to tease apart whether these idiosyncrasies caused differences in suppression time or whether sound symbolism caused such differences (a point that also holds for Hung et al's, 2017, study). Importantly, there are a number of potential idiosyncratic properties that could cause differences in suppression time.…”