When the Sound-Symbolism Effect Disappears: The Differential Role of Order and Timing in Presenting Visual and Auditory Stimuli

Abstract

Köhler's observation that most people match pseudoword "maluma" to curvy objects and "takete" to spiky objects represented the well-known example of sound symbolism-the idea that link between sound and meaning of words was not entirely arbitrary. This study was aimed to examine the existence of sound symbolism in natural language and to consider the potential role of some aspects of experimental design and stimuli features which had not been considered in experimental studies so far. Three experiments were done in order to explore the influence of visual information on language processing. Visual lexical decision task with the sharp-sounding and soft-sounding verbal stimuli presented within the spiky and curvy frames was used. Reaction time analysis in these three experiments highlighted additional aspects of visual and language processing which influence the potential interplay of these two processes. As results revealed, when visual information preceded presentation of verbal material for approximately 1000 ms or when visual and verbal material were presented simultaneously, the processing was being delayed and the interactions of these two processes occurred. The pattern of obtained results gave further support to the idea of sound symbolism as pre-semantic phenomenon and the hypothesis that the effect emerged from very early stages of language processing.

Balloons and bavoons versus spikes and shikes: ERPs reveal shared neural processes for shape–sound-meaning congruence in words, and shape–sound congruence in pseudowords

“…This finding runs counter to the facilitatory effects on RTs for pseudowords observed by Westbury (2005), and the inhibitory effects on RT to both words and pseudowords in Sucevic et al (2013). As described previously, minor experimental manipulations of the timing of stimuli and the visual shapes employed as frames can have dramatic effects on whether sound symbolic effects are observed in RT, making this result difficult to interpret at this stage.…”

“…Given the known fragility of sound symbolic effects in behavioural tasks (Sucevic et al, 2013), it is perhaps unsurprising that the lexical decision task did not pick up differences in processing speed: Sound symbolic effects are known to be evident in the first 500 ms of the ERP (Kovic et al, 2010). Here, correct reaction times averaged over 700 ms, meaning that sound symbolic effects may have subsided by the time of the lexical decision.…”

“…In the current study we presented words previously demonstrated to have sound-shape-meaning congruence for speakers of Serbian, within frame shapes previously demonstrated to have canonical sound symbolic congruence for speakers of Serbian, and compared these with pseudowords generated from the real words using highly controlled phonological alternations consistent with the patterns of documented sound symbolism in Serbian. Furthermore, given the known fragility of sound symbolic effects in reaction time studies (Sucevic et al, 2013), we investigated these effects using both behavioural and neurophysiological measures of written word processing, to capture the underlying neural processing of sound symbolic effects, as well as the behavioural outcomes of these processes.…”

“…For example, recent studies have demonstrated that minor variants in experimental procedure can alter whether sound symbolic effects are observed. For example, Sucevic, Jankovic, and Kovic (2013) demonstrated that sound symbolic congruence can modulate lexical decision times to both words and non-words, but only under particular experimental conditions: RTs are influenced by frame congruence for all lexical decisions if the frame and word are presented simultaneously. However, if the frame appears shortly before the onset of the written wordform, the effect is only evident for highly typical frame shapes, whereas if the frame is presented more than one second before the word-form, no effects of frame congruence are observed.…”

“…The frames were selected as the best example of spiky and curvy frames established in a study of sound symbolic typicality, for written Serbian (Sucevic et al, 2013). Stimulus arrangement was designed to closely resemble the stimuli in Westbury's study (2005) with a white-filled frame, centred on a black presentation area of 432 Â 288 pixels.…”