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Sound-Shape Correspondences for Pseudowords in People with Aphasia

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Josh Dorsi¹ (jxd5826@psu.edu), Chaleece Sandberg², Simon Lacey^1,3, Lynne Nygaard⁴, K. Sathian^1,3; ¹Penn State College of Medicine, ²Penn State College of Health and Human Development, ³Penn State College of Liberal Arts, ⁴Emory University

Speech sounds themselves can convey certain meanings, a phenomenon referred to as sound symbolism. For example, neurologically intact people typically indicate that the pseudowords ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’ sound rounded and pointed, respectively. Sound symbolism in people with aphasia is under-studied, but we recently reported that people with aphasia were above chance in two-alternative forced-choice tasks classifying pseudowords as sounding rounded or pointed (Dorsi et al., Poster LBA008.095 presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, 2024). Here we build on this work by comparing neurologically intact people and people with aphasia on ratings of how rounded/pointed pseudowords sound. Ten people with post-stroke aphasia (5 female, 5 male; mean age = 57) and six age-matched neurologically intact people (2 female, 4 male; mean age = 52) listened to fifty consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel pseudowords. These pseudowords were drawn from a larger stimulus set with prior rounded/pointed ratings (McCormick et al., Proceedings 37th Annual Meeting Cognitive Science Society, 2015). The pseudowords selected for the current study were chosen to range from sounding “Very Rounded” to sounding “Very Pointed”. Participants rated how rounded/pointed each pseudoword sounded using a five-point scale. We found a strong correlation between the ratings from neurologically intact people and people with aphasia (r = 0.76, p < .001), indicating that the pattern of sound-symbolic shape mappings is substantially preserved in aphasia. This offers important evidence in support of the viability of developing an aphasia rehabilitation tool based on sound symbolism.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic