Parsing the role of consonants versus vowels in the classic Takete-Maluma phenomenon.

Abstract

Wolfgang Köhler (1929, Gestalt psychology, New York, NY: Liveright) famously reported a bias in people's choice of nonsense words as labels for novel objects, pointing to possible naïve expectations about language structure. Two accounts have been offered to explain this bias, one focusing on the visuomotor effects of different vowel forms and the other focusing on variation in the acoustic structure and perceptual quality of different consonants. To date, evidence in support of both effects is mixed. Moreover, the veracity of either effect has often been doubted due to perceived limitations in methodologies and stimulus materials. A novel word-construction experiment is presented to test both proposed effects using randomized word- and image-generation techniques to address previous methodological concerns. Results show that participants are sensitive to both vowel and consonant content, constructing novel words of relatively sonorant consonants and rounded vowels to label curved object images, and of relatively plosive consonants and nonrounded vowels to label jagged object images. Results point to additional influences on word construction potentially related to the articulatory affordances or constraints accompanying different word forms.