Sound symbolism

  • Lammertink et al. (2016)
  • N papers = 11, N experiments = 44, N participants = 425
  • Bias to assume a non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning ("bouba-kiki effect") in forced-choice paradigms.
  • Curator is Sho Tsuji
  • Search Strategy: "We followed the PRISMA statement (Moher, Liberati, Tetzlaff, Altmann, & The PRISMA Group, 2009) for selecting and reporting on the studies to be included in our meta-analysis. We decided to include articles if they were assessing the on-line processing of sound-symbolically matching or mismatching sound-shape correspondences related to the bouba-kiki effect (thus, testing both ‘round’ and ‘spiky’ correspondences) in children up to and inclusive of the age of 3 years. ‘Matching’ responses refer to children’s responses to congruent sound-shape associations (round word+round object; spiky word+spiky object) and ‘mismatching’ responses refer to children’s responses to incongruent sound-shape associations (round word+spiky shape; spiky word+round shape), respectively. Since we were already aware of 10 published articles, conference presentations or conference proceedings papers that fit our inclusion criteria,and since we considered our strict inclusion this criteria to lead to a rather small selection of articles, we chose a seed strategy rather than a broad literature search. We began by assembling 4 key articles that fit the inclusion criteria (Asano et al., 2015; Maurer, Pathman & Mondloch, 2006; Ozturk, Krehm & Vouloumanos, 2012; Spector & Maurer, 2013) as well as two recent review papers on sound symbolism including infancy (Imai & Kita, 2014; Lockwood & Dingemanse, 2015). For all of these articles, we screened all potentially relevant references cited in these articles as well as references citing these articles and ‘related articles’ on their title and abstracts on scholar.google.com. Additionally, we screened titles and abstracts of all articles that cited one of the 4 key articles mentioned above (Asano et al. 2015: 16 citations; Maurer et al. 2006: 241 citations; Ozturk et al. 2012: 54 citations and Spector and Maurer, 2013: 9 citations). This search did not lead to additional eligible articles. In addition, we were aware of 9 conference presentations or conference proceedings papers that fit our inclusion criteria and were not redundant with one of our seed articles, including three by the two first authors of the present article."
  • Systematic: yes