An investigation of phonetic symbolism.

Investigations concerning the accuracy of matching English words with their foreign equivalents showed that English could be matched with both the Japanese and Croatian equivalents at a level beyond chance expectancy. However, the correct equivalents among Japanese and Croatian word pairs were not matched at a significant level. "The latter finding was interpreted as being contrary to the hypothesis of the gestalt organization of trace systems, and the related hypotheses of phonetic symbolism and physiognomic language." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A crosslinguistic investigation of phonetic symbolism.

An analysis of the sound of words demonstrated that in both English and Japanese, initial vowels and consonants are pleasant and the latter vowels and consonants are as unpleasant. Similarity in symbolism on the basis of the phonetic aspect was found between words in English and Japanese. From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4GH23M. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Another look at phonetic symbolism.

Various possible meanings of "phonetic symbolism" are discussed. Phonetic symbolism is distinguised from onomatopoeia. "Elemental" and "structural" phonetic symbolism are defined. Elemental phonetic symbolism is discussed in terms of 7 hierarchically arranged questions which define "subjective" phonetic symbolism (that detected by Os) and "objective" phonetic symbolism (over-representation of particular sounds in words of particular connotations in natural languages). Experimental and empirical evidence relevant to each question are discussed, and it is concluded that both subjective and objective elemental phonetic symbolism are real phenomena, but that the patterns of symbolism are unrelated in historically unrelated languages. The feedback theory of phonetic symbolism (Taylor) is considered in greater detail than heretofore. (31 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonetic symbolism in natural languages.

"Three separate investigations, using three lists of English words and six foreign languages, have shown superior to chance agreement and accuracy in the translation of unfamiliar tongues. The agreement can be explained as the result of a 'cultural conception' of the symbolic value attached to various phonetic combinations. This hypothesis does not explain the accuracy of translation. The accuracy can be explained by the assumption of some universal phonetic symbolism in which speech may have originated or toward which speech may be evolving." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonetic symbolism reexamined.

Taylor (1963) pointed out (a) results of studies of universal phonetic symbolism in natural languages were contradictory. (b) Taylor and Taylor (1962) showed that speakers of different languages tend to assign different meanings to the same sounds. She argued, therefore, that current theories of phonetic symbolism, which imply its universality, must be revised, and offered a theory based upon the occurrence of certain sounds more predominantly in some meaning categories than in others. It is pointed out, however, that Taylor overlooked important methodological factors in "contradictory" studies and did not take into account findings contrary to those of Taylor and Taylor. In addition, the "language habits" theory is examined and various untested assumptions and other difficulties are pointed out. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonetic symbolism in an artificial language.

An analysis of previous studies suggested that certain letters and letter combinations occur more often than would be expected by chance in affectively pleasant words, while others are overrepresented in unpleasant words. On the basis of data from these prior investigations, 14 pairs of artificial words were constructed and randomly paired with 7 good and 7 bad adjectives. College, deaf high school, and hearing high school Ss were presented with the task of matching each of the English adjectives with the correct member of the artificial word pair presented with it. The college and hearing high school Ss matched as predicted significantly more often than chance expectancy, which deaf Ss did not. The results are interpreted as supporting the existence of phonetic symbolism of word sounds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Factors determining the guessing of meanings of foreign words.

6groups of 40 English-speaking Ss judged the equivalence of 50 pairs of frequently used English, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew words presented auditorily, audio-visually, and visually. Ss guessed the English equivalent of Hebrew words and paired Japanese and Chinese, and Japanese and Hebrew words at better than chance levels. Chinese and Hebrew words were paired significantly below chance levels. Significant interactions between languages and method of presentation were obtained. Results were "interpreted as contrary to the hypothesis of a universal phonetic symbolism." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychomycology: An interdisciplinary application of symbolism.

"Psychology is the study of behavior. Mycology is the study of fungi" including mushrooms, which are currently of great interest in psychotomimetic research. There are 3 main types of bibliographical source material: (a) extensive mycology literature proper, (b) growing research literature related to possible chemotherapeutic uses of fungi, and (c) literature "which is just plain literature." Examples of each category are cited. "Our hypothesis is that there are no neutral or emotionally dispassionate feelings about the mushroom. Individuals appear to group themselves into mycophiles, mycophobes, and mycoambivalents. The mushroom is seen variously as a symbol of death or ecstasy, but rarely as a natural organism untinged with affective power." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Role-play validation of a sociocultural theory of symbolism.

As a form of role-play, 344 freshmen college students were asked to name inkblot responses likely to be reported by a perceiver who was under various mood conditions, such as love, anger, etc. The Ss were told that this was a study in aesthetics. The Es had prematched 16 well-known Rorschach symbols with their typical mood interpretation, and then examined the responses of Ss under role play to see if these hypothesized connections in fact occurred. 10 of the 16 mood-symbol pairs were validated, and it was concluded that Rychlak's theory of symbolism, which generated this study, was supported. The Ss were relying upon, in an unsophisticated manner, the same cultural experience which Rorschach or dream analysts rely upon in making their hypotheses about personality. (21 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mediated and primary stimulus-generalization bases of sexual symbolism.

Ss were asked to make associations of masculinity or femininity to simple geometric figures reproduced in such a way as to encompass both the primary stimulus-generalization basis of sexual symbolism emphasized by Freud and a mediated basis unrelated directly to psychoanalytic theory--the color dichotomy of black-gray. The materials were constructed so that each response would be scored as consistent with 1 basis of symbolism only. The results showed that both the primary and mediated bases of symbolism were very significantly effective in determining responses (p     

Lexical characteristics of words used in emotional Stroop experiments.

Validity of the emotional Stroop task hinges on equivalence between the emotion and the control words in terms of lexical features related to word recognition. The authors evaluated the lexical features of 1,033 words used in 32 published emotional Stroop studies. Emotion words were significantly lower in frequency of use, longer in length, and had smaller orthographic neighborhoods than words used as controls. These lexical features contribute to slower word recognition and hence are likely to contribute to delayed latencies in color naming. The often-replicated slowdown in color naming of emotion words may be due, in part, to lexical differences between the emotion and control words used in the majority of such studies to date. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sexual symbolism and the variables of sex and personality integration.

The purpose was to reassess the hypothesis of sexual symbolism using stimulus figures similar to those presented in Levy's study (see 28: 8696). The hypotheses were: (1) when asked to designate stimulus objects as male or female, Ss respond to elongated, pointed, or penetrating objects as male, and to hollow, rounded, or enclosing objects as female; and (2) psychiatric patients identify these objects as male or female, respectively, less frequently than nonpsychiatric patients. 20 psychiatric patients and 20 college students, each group made up of an equal number of males and females, served as Ss. Both hypotheses were confirmed at significant levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of distributional learning on rats' sensitivity to phonetic information.

During the first year of life, infants show decreased sensitivity to phonetic differences not used in their native language and increased sensitivity to the differences that are used. It has been shown that this change in speech perception is a function of the distributional properties of the input. The present study explores whether the mechanism responsible for the developmental changes regarding the organization of phonetic categories is a general mechanism shared with other animals. The results demonstrate that the distributional exposure to a phonetic continuum affects the subsequent discrimination of these phonemes in rats, indicating that the ability to use distributional cues to change the phonetic category structure extends beyond humans. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

An effort at studying Rorschach content symbolism: The frog response.

The conception was advanced that a frog response on the Rorschach Test constituted a symbolic representation of unconscious cloacal birth and oral impregnation fantasies. It was hypothesized that a group of frog responders would display more eating disturbances than would a comparison group. A group of 31 psychiatric patients, giving frog responses in their Rorschach protocols, was compared with a matched control group. A chisquare test corrected for continuity proved significant beyond the .001 level of confidence for a 2-tailed test. This was interpreted as lending support to a conception of interpreting Rorschach responses as symbolic communications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective attention and the acquisition of new phonetic categories.

A class of selective attention models often applied to speech perception is used to study effects of training on the perception of an unfamiliar phonetic contrast. Attention-to-dimension (A2D) models of perceptual learning assume that the dimensions that structure listeners' perceptual space are constant and that learning involves only the reweighting of existing dimensions to emphasize or de-emphasize different sensory dimensions. Multidimensional scaling is used to identify the acoustic-phonetic dimensions listeners use before and after training to recognize the 3 classes of Korean stop consonants. Results suggest that A2D models can account for some observed restructuring of listeners' perceptual space, but listeners also show evidence of directing attention to a previously unattended dimension of phonetic contrast. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Representational specificity of within-category phonetic variation in the long-term mental lexicon.

This study examines the potential encoding in long-term memory of subphonemic, within-category variation in voice onset time (VOT) and the degree to which this encoding of subtle variation is mediated by lexical competition. In 4 long-term repetition-priming experiments, magnitude of priming was examined as a function of variation in VOT in words with voiced counterparts (cape-gape) and without (cow-*gow) and words whose counterparts were high frequency (pest-best) or low frequency (pile-bile). The results showed that within-category variation was indeed encoded in memory and could have demonstrable effects on priming. However, there were also robust effects of prototypical representations on priming. Encoding of within-category variation was also affected by the presence of lexical counterparts and by the frequency of counterparts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The double-edged sword of rewards for participation in psychology experiments.

This quasi-experimental study examined participation rates and sample characteristics of participants recruited with and without the offer of course credit. In Sample 1, where course credit is not usually offered, credit was added in one condition (N = 195) and not in the other (N = 175). In Sample 2, where credit is usually offered, it was maintained in one condition (N = 92) and removed in the other (N = 178). Results in both samples revealed that participation rates were higher in the credit conditions; they plunged when customary rewards were taken away. Results also revealed evidence of sample bias. More specifically, the motivational characteristics of participants and nonparticipants differed in all conditions except the new credit condition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bringing history to life: Simulating landmark experiments in psychology.

The course in history of psychology can be challenging for students, many of whom enter it with little background in history and faced with unfamiliar names and concepts. The sheer volume of material can encourage passive memorization unless efforts are made to increase student involvement. As part of a trend toward experiential history, historians of science have begun to supplement their lectures with demonstrations of classic physics experiments as a way to bring the history of science to life. Here, the authors report on computer simulations of five landmark experiments from early experimental psychology in the areas of reaction time, span of attention, and apparent motion. The simulations are designed not only to permit hands-on replication of historically important results but also to reproduce the experimental procedures closely enough that students can gain a feel for the nature of early research and the psychological processes being studied. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sources of reports of visual and auditory sensations in perceptual-isolation experiments.

The review analyzes the experiments on perceptual isolation with special reference to the phenomena of reported visual and auditory sensations. Variables analyzed include: methods of confinement and restriction, conditions of illumination, duration of isolation, set, instructions and suggestions, reporting or verbalization instructions, sleep, S populations, prior knowledge and expectations, intelligence and personality characteristics of Ss, stress response, and methods of obtaining reported visual and auditory sensations. The relevance of some of the findings to physiological, psychoanalytic, cognitive, and social psychological theories of perceptual isolation are discussed. Variables which seem important in the phenomena discussed are set, verbalization instructions, S's alertness, and E's methods of obtaining responses. (2 p. ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When variability matters more than meaning: The effect of lexical forms on use of phonemic contrasts.

During the first half of the 2nd year of life, infants struggle to use phonemic distinctions in label–object association tasks. Prior experiments have demonstrated that exposure to the phonemes in distinct lexical forms (e.g., /d/ and /t/ in daddy and tiger, respectively) facilitates infants' use of phonemic contrasts but also that they struggle to generalize the use of phonemic contrasts to novel syllabic contexts (Thiessen, 2007; Thiessen & Yee, 2010). Further, in prior research, infants have been provided only with experience in lexical forms that refer to novel objects, while many lexical forms in the natural environment do not have easily identified visual referents. The experiments in this article show that even lexical forms without referents can facilitate use of phonemic contrasts. Additionally, the results indicate that when lexical forms provide infants with enough variability (for example, a consonant followed by multiple different vowels), infants are able to generalize to novel contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)