Hearing mouth shapes: Sound symbolism and the reverse McGurk effect
Journal Title: i-Perception - Year , Vol 3, Issue 8
Abstract
In their recent article, Sweeny, Guzman-Martinez, Ortega, Grabowecky, and Suzuki (2012) demonstrate that heard speech sounds modulate the perceived shape of briefly presented visual stimuli. Ovals, whose aspect ratio (relating width to height) varied on a trial-by-trial basis, were rated as looking wider when a /woo/ sound was presented, and as taller when a /wee/ sound was presented instead. On the one hand, these findings add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that audiovisual correspondences can have perceptual (as well as decisional) effects. On the other hand, they prompt a question concerning their origin. Although the currently popular view is that crossmodal correspondences are based on the internalization of the natural multisensory statistics of the environment (see Spence, 2011), these new results suggest instead that certain correspondences may actually be based on the sensorimotor responses associated with human vocalizations. As such, the findings of Sweeny et al. help to breathe new life into Sapir's (1929) once-popular “embodied” explanation of sound symbolism. Furthermore, they pose a challenge for those psychologists wanting to determine which among a number of plausible accounts best explains the available data on crossmodal correspondences.
Authors and Affiliations
Charles Spence, Ophelia Deroy
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP682510
- DOI 10.1068/i0558ic
- Views 101
- Downloads 0
View-based matching can be more than image matching: The importance of considering an animal's perspective
Using vision for navigation is important for many animals and a common debate is the extent to which spatial performance can be explained by “simple” view-based matching strategies. We discuss, in the con...
Binocular rivalry for beginners
The power of liking: Highly sensitive aesthetic processing for guiding us through the world
Assessing liking is one of the most intriguing and influencing types of processing we experience day by day. We can decide almost instantaneously what we like and are highly consistent in our assessments, even across cul...
Interaction of depth probes and style of depiction
We study the effect of stylistic differences on the nature of pictorial spaces as they appear to an observer when looking into a picture. Four pictures chosen from diverse styles of depiction were studied by 2 different...
Prevalence effect in haptic search
In visual search tasks, the ratio of target-present to target-absent trials has important effects on miss rates. In this study, we examined whether the target prevalence effect occurs in a haptic search task by using art...