ArticleRoyal Society open science2017
Glyph guessing for 'oo' and 'ee': spatial frequency information in sound symbolic matching for ancient and unfamiliar scripts.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Spiky figures correspond to Japanese names written in square characters.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- The Bouba-Kiki effect is predicted by sound properties but not speech properties.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- ThePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Japanese Sound-Symbolic Words for Representing the Hardness of an Object Are Judged Similarly by Japanese and English Speakers.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The AI trilemma: Saving the planet without ruining our jobs.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2022Article
- A thirteenth-century theory of speech.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2019Article
- Glyph guessing for 'oo' and 'ee': spatial frequency information in sound symbolic matching for ancient and unfamiliar scripts.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
In three experiments, we asked whether diverse scripts contain interpretable information about the speech sounds they represent. When presented with a pair of unfamiliar letters, adult readers correctly guess which is /i/ (the 'ee' sound in 'feet'), and which is /u/ (the 'oo' sound in 'shoe') at rates higher than expected by chance, as shown in a large sample of Singaporean university students (Experiment 1) and replicated in a larger sample of international Internet users (Experiment 2). To uncover what properties of the letters contribute to different scripts' 'guessability,' we analysed the visual spatial frequencies in each letter (Experiment 3). We predicted that the lower spectral frequencies in the formants of the vowel /u/ would pattern with lower spatial frequencies in the corresponding letters. Instead, we found that across all spatial frequencies, the letter with more black/white cycles (i.e. more ink) was more likely to be guessed as /u/, and the larger the difference between the glyphs in a pair, the higher the script's guessability. We propose that diverse groups of humans across historical time and geographical space tend to employ similar iconic strategies for representing speech in visual form, and provide norms for letter pairs from 56 diverse scripts.
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