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

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).