What Does a Horgous Look Like? Nonsense Words Elicit Meaningful Drawings

Davis, Charles P.; Morrow, Hannah; Lupyan, Gary

doi:10.1111/cogs.12791

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Thus, studying such representations using measures that are themselves formatted as descriptions may offer a new kind of insight (as it did in the present studies) in ways that make it a valuable addition (though certainly not a replacement) to cognitive psychology’s methodological toolkit. (Similarly, recent and creative work has explored connections between visual processing and subjects’ drawings of visual stimuli [Davis et al, 2019; Fan et al, 2018]. We think those studies carry a similar kind of value, owing in part to the generative nature of such visual production tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Seeing and speaking: How verbal “description length” encodes visual complexity.

Sun¹,

Firestone²

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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What is the relationship between complexity in the world and complexity in the mind? Intuitively, increasingly complex objects and events should give rise to increasingly complex mental representations (or perhaps a plateau in complexity after a certain point). However, a counterintuitive possibility with roots in information theory is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the "objective" complexity of some stimulus and the complexity of its mental representation, because excessively complex patterns might be characterized by surprisingly short computational descriptions (e.g., if they are represented as having been generated "randomly"). Here, we demonstrate that this is the case, using a novel approach that takes the notion of "description" literally. Subjects saw static and dynamic visual stimuli whose objective complexity could be carefully manipulated, and they described these stimuli in their own words by giving freeform spoken descriptions of them. Across three experiments totaling over 10,000 speech clips, spoken descriptions of shapes (Experiment 1), dot-arrays (Experiment 2), and dynamic motion-paths (Experiment 3) revealed a striking quadratic relationship between the raw complexity of these stimuli and the length of their spoken descriptions. In other words, the simplest and most complex stimuli received the shortest descriptions, while those stimuli with a "medium" degree of complexity received the longest descriptions. Follow-up analyses explored the particular words used by subjects, allowing us to further explore how such stimuli were represented. We suggest that the mind engages in a kind of lossy compression for overly complex stimuli, and we discuss the utility of such freeform responses for exploring foundational questions about mental representation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Seeing and speaking: How verbal “description length” encodes visual complexity.

Sun¹,

Firestone²

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…There has been a growing interest in the exploration of sound symbolism in natural language. Studies that explore this subject typically find that the physical properties of entities are reflected in the speech sounds of their names (Westermann, 1937;Berlin, 1992Berlin, , 2006Shinohara and Kawahara, 2010;Sidhu and Pexman, 2018;Davis et al, 2019). These findings challenge one of the principles of the linguistic sign put forth by Saussure (1916) which assumes that the relationship between the form of the linguistic sign and its meaning is arbitrary.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship

Kilpatrick

Ćwiek²,

Lewis³

et al. 2023

Front. Psychol.

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IntroductionThis paper presents a cross-linguistic study of sound symbolism, analysing a six-language corpus of all Pokémon names available as of January 2022. It tests the effects of labial consonants and voiced plosives on a Pokémon attribute known as friendship. Friendship is a mechanic in the core series of Pokémon video games that arguably reflects how friendly each Pokémon is.MethodPoisson regression is used to examine the relationship between the friendship mechanic and the number of times /p/, /b/, /d/, /m/, /g/, and /w/ occur in the names of English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, and French Pokémon.ResultsBilabial plosives, /p/ and /b/, typically represent high friendship values in Pokémon names while /m/, /d/, and /g/ typically represent low friendship values. No association is found for /w/ in any language.DiscussionMany of the previously known cases of cross-linguistic sound symbolic patterns can be explained by the relationship between how sounds in words are articulated and the physical qualities of the referents. This study, however, builds upon the underexplored relationship between sound symbolism and abstract qualities.

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“…We hypothesized that the inclusion of a label in the description of an odd behavior affects the categorization itself: social experience tells people that mental disorders are accompanied by odd behavior and have specific names. Although the authors used artificial labels, even “meaningless” words can activate certain areas of semantic memory, prompting people to interpret these words based on their experiences ( Davis et al, 2019 ). Additionally, some people tend to trust any information containing scientific terminology ( Fernandez-Duque et al, 2015 ; Pennycook et al, 2015 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Explanatory Effect of a Label: Its Influence on a Category Persists Even If We Forget the Label

2022

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In this study we replicated the explanatory effect of a label which had been found by Giffin et al. (2017). In their experiments, they used vignettes describing an odd behavior of a person based on culturally specific disorders that were unfamiliar to respondents. It turned out that explanations which explain an odd behavior through a person’s tendency to behave that way (circulus vitiosus) seemed more persuasive if the disorder was given a label that was used in the explanation. We replicated these results in Experiment 1, and in a follow-up Experiment 2 we examined the familiarity with category information and the evaluation of that category over time (the delay lasted one week). We realized that the label effect persists even when people make judgments based on their recollections about a category. Furthermore, according to a content analysis of the recollections, participants in the label condition remembered more information from the vignettes but tended to forget an artificial label; however, they used other words from the disorder domain instead (like “disease” or “kleptomania”). This allowed us to suggest a new interpretation of this effect: we suppose that in the Giffin et al. (2017) experiments the label did not bring any new features to a category itself, but pointed to a relevant domain instead, so the effect appeared from the activation of areas of knowledge in semantic memory and the application of relevant schema for learning a new phenomenon.

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What Does a Horgous Look Like? Nonsense Words Elicit Meaningful Drawings

Cited by 12 publications

References 46 publications

Seeing and speaking: How verbal “description length” encodes visual complexity.

Seeing and speaking: How verbal “description length” encodes visual complexity.

A cross-linguistic, sound symbolic relationship between labial consonants, voiced plosives, and Pokémon friendship

The Explanatory Effect of a Label: Its Influence on a Category Persists Even If We Forget the Label

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