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 nonword bouba tends to be associated with curved shapes, whereas the sharp-sounding nonword kiki is deemed to be related to angular shapes. People’s tendency to associate sounds and shapes has been observed across different languages. In the present study, we reexamined the claim by Hung, Styles, and Hsieh (2017) that such sound–shape mappings can occur before an individual becomes 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 shape 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 combinations, 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.

Affective Arousal Links Sound to Meaning

“…Although our data do not permit a direct conclusion about the causal role of arousal in driving the boubakiki effect, many of the effect's characteristics, such as its prevalence across different age groups (e.g., Ozturk et al, 2013) and cultures (e.g., Bremner et al, 2013), can be explained by the emotional-mediation hypothesis. Particularly, recent findings on the occurrence of the effect even in the absence of visual awareness (Heyman et al, 2019;Hung et al, 2017) suggest the involvement of automatic processes that bypass higher order cognitive analysis. This type of stimulus-response processing has been frequently reported for highly emotional stimuli; for instance, individuals with cortical blindness show spontaneous facial and pupillary reactions to nonconsciously perceived expressions of fear and happiness (Tamietto et al, 2009).…”

“…Given that the bouba-kiki effect shows up early in development (Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006; Ozturk et al, 2013), exists in radically different cultures (Bremner et al, 2013), is implicit (Westbury, 2005; but see Westbury, 2018), and occurs even prior to conscious awareness of the visual stimuli (Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels, & Moors, 2019; Hung, Styles, & Hsieh, 2017), it is plausible that the mechanism underlying this phenomenon may be fundamental to human experience. Here, we propose that emotional congruence—the similarity in the arousal elicited by auditory and visual stimuli—may mediate the association between shapes and words, with kiki -like words 1 and spiky shapes invoking a higher level of arousal than bouba -like words and rounded shapes.…”

A round Bouba is easier to remember than a curved Kiki: Sound-symbolism can support associative memory

“…Although there is a wealth of research on the impact of sound-symbolism, much less is known about the mechanisms that give rise to these associations between the acoustic and articulatory properties of phonemes and other stimuli or properties. Sidhu and Pexman (2018) provided a review of the current thinking regarding potential causal mechanisms, which include: (1) a co-occurrence view whereby phoneme features and related stimuli features co-occur in the world, (2) the proposal that phonemes and associated stimuli share some properties at the perceptual, conceptual, affective, or linguistic level, (3) a hypothesis attributing the associations to structural properties of the brain, evolution, or language patterns. It seems possible that sound-symbolism and its impact on memory might be attributable to a special form of co-occurrence/associative learning.…”

“…It seems possible that sound-symbolism and its impact on memory might be attributable to a special form of co-occurrence/associative learning. The latter would lead to obligatory, pre-awareness, but albeit weak links (see Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels, & Moors, 2019) between phonemes and certain properties of objects, which − like other forms of co-occurrence-based associations − can support encoding and retrieval of new associations. However, this remains a speculative account; further research is needed to elucidate the nature of the sound-symbolism links.…”

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

“…Striking recent work (Hung, Styles, & Hsieh, 2017) suggests that these mappings may have an unconscious basis and that participants may be able to 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 preregistered report by Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels, and Moors (2019), has potentially far-reaching implications for the role of awareness in language processing (Hassin, 2013; Rabagliati, Robertson, & Carmel, 2018).…”