English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Plus

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Insights

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Zendy Tools

Zendy Open

Sound symbolism refers to the intuition that a word’s sound should match the characteristics of its referent (e.g., kiki should label something spiky) and its prevalence and systematicity should provide compelling evidence for an intuitive mapping between linguistic form and meaning. 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). However, there are significant concerns about the generalizability of those findings and whether they in fact provide evidence for the unconscious computation of sound symbolism. Here, we present an “adversarial Commentary,” in which we highlight those concerns and discuss how they might be resolved. Our adversarial Commentary borrows from the idea of adversarial collaborations (Mellers, Hertwig, & Kahneman, 2001), in which scientists, despite holding conflicting theoretical views, work together to design experiments that will be maximally informative tests of their theories. In the case of our Commentary, we synthesize critiques of the original work, by Rabagliati, with reasoned counterarguments, by Heyman and Moors, in order to reach a better understanding and convey a clearer message to readers. Importantly, where traditional Commentaries and Replies may talk past one another, our adversarial Commentary presents an integration of our views. As a result, our Commentary offers an agreed path forward for understanding unconscious sound symbolism, with broader implications for methodological standards in researching unconscious cognition. The prior articles on unconscious sound symbolism used a technique called breaking continuous flash suppression, which relies on binocular rivalry. 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). Breakthrough from continuous flash suppression has been used to make a number of strong claims about what can be processed without awareness, from facial emotions (Yang, Zald, & Blake, 2007) to sentence meanings (Sklar et al., 2012), but not every claim has generalized. For instance, Rabagliati et al. (2018) consistently failed to replicate findings that the meanings of words and phrases affected breakthrough but did find that 949461 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797620949461Rabagliati et al.Unconscious Sound Symbolism: An Adversarial Commentary article-commentary2020

psychological science

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