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Eye Movements Reveal Sensitivity to Sound Symbolism Early and Late in Word Learning
Although the relationship between sound and meaning in
language is arbitrary, reliable correspondences between sound
and meaning have been found in natural language. These
sound symbolic relationships affect word learning, but less is
known about how sound symbolism affects online processing
during learning or for well-learned stimuli. We use the visual
world paradigm and an artificial lexicon featuring carefully
controlled sound symbolic correspondences to examine the
effects of sound symbolism on the online processing of novel
and well-learned stimuli. Initially, participants chose novel
shapes matching the sound symbolic properties of the word
above chance, reliably fixating consistent shapes around word
offset. As learning approached ceiling, accuracy and reaction
time differences between matching and mismatching stimuli
disappeared but a disadvantage in the online processing of
mismatching stimuli persisted in the form of lagging target
fixations. This suggests that sound symbolism affects the
online processing of spoken stimuli even for well-learned
words
Neural Correlates of Inter-trial Priming and Role-Reversal in Visual Search
Studies of priming of visual perception demonstrate that observers respond more quickly to targets in a field of distractors when relevant features are repeated versus novel or role-reversed. In a recent brain imaging study participants were presented with two items of one color and a single item in a different color with the task of reporting the orientation of the uniquely colored item. Consistent with previous behavioral reports, they found that observers were faster to respond when the target and distractor colors were identical to the previous trial than when they were reversed. They found reduced BOLD activity in brain areas linked with attentional control on trials where the target and distractor colors were repeated relative to reversed, which they interpreted as reflecting response suppression (decreased BOLD signal for repeated stimuli). However, since their design only compared repeated versus reversed task demands, it is logically possible that this pattern reflects increased BOLD signal for role-reversed stimuli: activity required to inhibit previously facilitated information and select previously inhibited information. We explored this possibility with a task where we contrasted the signal generated by repeated, reversed and novel features. Our data suggest that the majority of the change in neural signal elicited by priming of pop-out reflects increased activation when selection criteria are reversed