Priming Boubas and Kikis: Searching For a Sound Symbolic Priming Effect (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Prime Example of the Maluma/Takete Effect? Testing for Sound Symbolic Priming
Cognitive Science, 2016
Certain nonwords, like maluma and takete, are associated with roundness and sharpness, respectively. However, this has typically been demonstrated using explicit tasks. We investigated whether this association would be detectable using a more implicit measure-a sequential priming task. We began with a replication of the standard Maluma/Takete effect (Experiments 1a and 1b) before examining whether round and sharp nonword primes facilitated the categorization of congruent shapes (Experiment 2). We found modest evidence of a priming effect in response accuracy. We next examined whether nonword primes affected categorization of ambiguous shapes, using visual (Experiment 3) and auditory primes (Experiment 4). We found that ambiguous shapes were categorized as round (sharp) more often following the presentation of a round (sharp) nonword. This suggests that phonemes may activate related shape information which then affects the processing of shapes, and that this association emerges even when participants are not explicitly searching for it.
Classically, in the bouba-kiki association task, a subject is asked to find the best association between one of two shapes-a round one and a spiky one-and one of two pseudowordsbouba and kiki. Numerous studies report that spiky shapes are associated with kiki, and round shapes with bouba. This task is likely the most prevalent in the study of non-conventional relationships between linguistic forms and meanings, also known as sound symbolism. However, associative tasks are explicit in the sense that they highlight phonetic and visual contrasts and require subjects to establish a crossmodal link between stimuli of different natures. Additionally, recent studies have raised the question whether visual resemblances between the target shapes and the letters explain the pattern of association, at least in literate subjects. In this paper, we report a more implicit testing paradigm of the bouba-kiki effect with the use of a lexical decision task with character strings presented in round or spiky frames. Pseudowords and words are, furthermore, displayed with either an angular or a curvy font to investigate possible graphemic bias. Innovative analyses of response times are performed with GAMLSS models, which offer a large range of possible distributions of error terms, and a generalized Gama distribution is found to be the most appropriate. No sound symbolic effect appears to be significant, but an interaction effect is in particular observed between spiky shapes and angular letters leading to faster response times. We discuss these results with respect to the visual saliency of angular shapes, priming, brain activation, synaesthesia and ideasthesia.
Sound to Meaning Mappings in the Bouba-Kiki Effect
Cognitive Science, 2015
Sound to meaning correspondences in spoken language are assumed to be largely arbitrary. However, research has identified a number of exceptions to the arbitrariness assumption. In particular, non-arbitrary mappings between sound and shape, the bouba/kiki effect, have been documented across diverse languages and both children and adults are sensitive to this type of sound symbolic mapping. The cognitive basis for the associations between nonword labels and particular shapes remains poorly understood making it difficult to predict how findings generalize beyond the limited stimuli tested. To identify systematic bases for sound-to-shape mappings, we collected ratings of roundedness and pointedness for a large database of pseudowords. We find that attributes of both consonants and vowels are systematically related to judged shape meanings of pseudowords, and offer hypotheses as to the cognitive mechanisms underlying the observed patterns.
Phonological and semantic priming: Evidence for task-independent effects
Memory & cognition, 1999
The questions asked in the present experiments concern the generality of semantic and phonological priming effects: Do these effects arise automatically regardless of target task, or are these effects restricted to target tasks that specifically require the retrieval of the primed information? In Experiment 1,subjects produced faster color matching times on targets preceded by a masked rhyming prime than on targets preceded by an orthographic control or an unrelated prime. This result suggests that automatic priming effects on the basis of phonological similarity can be obtained even when the target task does not make use of phonological information. This claim was reinforced in Experiment 2 in which a rhyme priming effect and a semantic priming effect were found in a semantic categorization task. In Experiment 3, the target task was phonological (rhyme detection), and, again, both phonological and semantic priming effects were observed. Finally, in Experiments 4 and 5, in a replication and an extension of Experiment 1,phonological and semantic priming effects were found in a color matching task, a task involvingneither phonological nor semantic processing. These results are most straightforwardly interpreted by assuming that both semantic and phonological priming effects are, at least in part, due to automatic activation of memorial representations.
Language and Cognition, 2012
There exists a fundamental paradox in linguistic cognition. Experiments show consistent sound-symbolic biases in people's processing of artificial words, yet the biases are not manifest in the structure of real words. To address this paradox, we designed an experiment to test the magnitude and source of these biases. Participants were tasked with matching nonsense words to novel object forms. One group was implicitly taught a matching rule congruent with biases reported previously, while a second group was taught a rule incongruent with this bias. In test trials, participants in the congruent condition performed only modestly but significantly better than chance and better than participants in the incongruent condition who performed at chance. These outcomes indicate the processing bias is real but weak and reflects an inherent learning bias. We discuss implications for language learning and transmission, considering the functional value of non-arbitrariness in language structur...
Strategic effects in associative priming with words, homophones, and pseudohomophones.
2002
Abstract 1. G. Lukatela and MT Turvey (1994x) showed that at a 57-ms prime-presentation duration, the naming of a visually presented target word (frog) is primed not only by an associate word (toad) but also by a homophone (towed) and a pseudohomophone (tode) of the associate. At a 250-ms prime presentation, priming with the homophone was no longer observed. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated these priming effects in the Dutch language.
2013
Sound symbolism or the nonarbitrary link between language sound and meaning are commonly found across many languages of the world. A well-known example is the association between rounded vs. angular shapes and labels (i.e., the Bouba-kiki effect by Köhler, 1929/1947). Previous research has shown that sound symbolic words play facilitative role for preschool children's novel verb learning (Imai, Kita, Nagumo & Okada, 2008; Kantartiz, Imai & Kita, 2011), helping children identify what aspects of motion events should be mapped to verbs. In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may facilitate language learning in human infants who have just begun to learn word meanings. Sound symbolism may be a useful cue particularly at the earliest stages of word learning, because this cue seems to be available without needing prior word learning experience (Gogate & Hollich, 2010). Using a habituation paradigm and a Bayesian model-based analysis, we demonstrated that 14-month-old infants could detect Köhlertype (1947) shape-sound symbolism, and could use this sensitivity in their effort to establish the word-referent association.
Associative and Phonological Priming Effects after Letter Search on the Prime
The American Journal of Psychology, 2006
Responses to target words typically are faster and more accurate after associatively related primes (e.g., "orange-juice") than after unrelated primes (e.g., "gluejuice"). This priming effect has been used as an index of semantic activation, and its elimination often is cited as evidence against semantic access. When participants are asked to perform a letter search on the prime, associative priming typically is eliminated, but repetition and morphological priming remain. It is possible that priming survives letter search when it arises from activity in codes that are represented before semantics. This experiment examined associative and phonological priming to determine whether priming from phonologically related rhymes would remain after letter search (e.g., "moose-juice"; rhyming items were orthographically dissimilar). When participants read the primes, equivalent associative and phonological priming effects were obtained; both effects were eliminated after letter search. The impact of letter search on semantic and phonological access and implications for the structural arrangement of lexical and semantic memory are discussed.
The facilitatory role of sound symbolism in infant word learning
2013
The facilitatory role of sound symbolism in infant word learning Michiko Miyazaki 1 (myzk@lab.tamagawa.ac.jp), Shohei Hidaka 2 (shhidaka@jaist.ac.jp), Mutsumi Imai 3 (imai@sfc.keio.ac.jp), H. Henny Yeung 4 (henny.yeung@parisdescartes.fr), Katerina Kantartzis 5 (k.f.kantartzis@bham.ac.uk), Hiroyuki Okada 1 (h.okada@eng.tamagawa.ac.jp), Sotaro Kita 5 (S.Kita@bham.ac.uk) Brain Science Institute, Tamagawa University, JAPAN, School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, JAPAN Department of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, JAPAN Universite Paris Descartes, & CNRS (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, UMR 8158), FRANCE School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK Abstract Sound symbolism or the nonarbitrary link between language sound and meaning are commonly found across many languages of the world. A well-known example is the association between rounded vs. angular shapes and labels (i.e., the Bouba-kiki effect by Kohler,...
The Bouba-Kiki effect reflects generic shape-sound associations
Humans robustly associate spiky shapes to words like “Kiki” and round shapes to words like “Bouba”. A popular explanation is that the mouth forms an angular shape while saying “Kiki” and a rounded shape while saying “Bouba”, leading to this association. Alternatively, there could be generic associations between the shapes of objects and the sounds they produce. These possibilities can be distinguished using unpronounceable sounds: the mouth-shape hypothesis predicts no effect, whereas the generic shape hypothesis predicts a systematic effect. Here, we show that the Bouba-Kiki effect is present for a variety of unpronounceable sounds ranging from reversed versions of Bouba-like and Kiki-like words and natural real object sounds to even pure tones. The effect was strongly correlated with the mean frequency of a sound independent of its pronounceability. Thus, the Bouba-Kiki effect reflects generic associations between sounds and object shape rather than mouth shape.