What is preferred in the in–out effect: articulation locations or articulation movement direction?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Words whose consonant articulation locations move inward (from the front to the back of the mouth) are preferred over words with the opposite consonant articulation location direction, a phenomenon termed the in–out effect. Recently, an alternative explanation for the in–out effect has been proposed based on position-weighted consonant preferences instead of articulation location movement preferences. However, this explanation has only been tested with word fragments. In two experiments, we tested these explanations using both, word fragment and pseudo-word stimuli. For word fragments, preferences could be explained by position-weighted consonant preferences, while, for pseudo-words, stimuli containing articulation location movement were evaluated more favourably than stimuli not containing articulation location movement. Thus, the in–out effect for word stimuli depends on movement of articulation locations. This finding demonstrates that a word’s sound symbolic meaning cannot always be explained by its individual letters but can depend on letter sequences.