Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (e.g., objects of a certain size or shape). Some of the best-known examples include the mil/mal effect (Sapir, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239, 1929) and the maluma/takete effect (Köhler, 1929). Interest in this topic has been on the rise within psychology, and studies have demonstrated that sound symbolic effects are relevant for many facets of cognition, including language, action, memory, and categorization. Sound symbolism also provides a mechanism by which words' forms can have nonarbitrary, iconic relationships with their meanings. Although various proposals have been put forth for how phonetic features (both acoustic and articulatory) come to be associated with stimuli, there is as yet no generally agreed-upon explanation. We review five proposals: statistical co-occurrence between phonetic features and associated stimuli in the environment, a shared property among phonetic features and stimuli; neural factors; species-general, evolved associations; and patterns extracted from language. We identify a number of outstanding questions that need to be addressed on this topic and suggest next steps for the field.

Human faces, and more specifically the eyes, play a crucial role in social and nonverbal communication because they signal valuable information about others. It is therefore surprising that few studies have investigated the impact of intergroup contexts and motivations on attention to the eyes of ingroup and outgroup members. Four experiments investigated differences in eye gaze to racial and novel ingroups using eye tracker technology. Whereas Studies 1 and 3 demonstrated that White participants attended more to the eyes of White compared to Black targets, Study 2 showed a similar pattern of attention to the eyes of novel ingroup and outgroup faces. Studies 3 and 4 also provided new evidence that eye gaze is flexible and can be meaningfully influenced by current motivations. Specifically, instructions to individuate specific social categories increased attention to the eyes of target group members. Furthermore, the latter experiments demonstrated that preferential attention to the eyes of ingroup members predicted important intergroup biases such as recognition of ingroup over outgroup faces (i.e., the Own Race Bias; Study 3) and willingness to interact with outgroup members (Study 4). The implication of these findings for general theorizing on face perception, individuation processes, and intergroup relations are discussed.Keywords: intergroup bias, social categorization, individuation, prejudice, Own Race Bias, face perception, social vision PREFERENTIAL ATTENTION TO THE EYES OF INGROUP MEMBERS 3An Eye for the I: Preferential Attention to the Eyes of Ingroup MembersThe human face is arguably the most important of all social stimuli because it is such a rich source of information. Faces, and more specifically the eyes, play crucial roles in social and nonverbal communication, signaling valuable information about others (Adams & Kleck, 2003Niedenthal, Mermillod, Maringer, & Hess, 2010). Despite the key role that the eyes play in social cognition, few studies have investigated the impact of intergroup contexts and motivation on attention to the eyes of ingroup and outgroup members. Although research has convincingly demonstrated that perceivers are better at understanding and extracting information from faces that belong to ingroups relative to outgroups (Adams, Franklin, Nelson, & Stevenson, 2010;Chiao et al., 2008;, it remains unclear how people process faces from their own and other categories and whether distinct patterns of attention to specific facial features exist for these groups.The current research seeks to address this gap directly. To this end, we first provide a general review of the literature regarding the central role of the eyes in social perception, and in particular, their role when perceiving ingroup and outgroup members. Then we move to a discussion regarding the impact of motivation on eye gaze and the relationship between eye gaze, and two important intergroup biases: the Own Race Bias (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010;Meissner & Brigham, 2001;Sporer, 2001) and a willing...

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Ratings of body-object interaction (BOI) measure the ease with which the human body can interact with a word's referent. Researchers have studied the effects of BOI in order to investigate the relationships between sensorimotor and cognitive processes. Such efforts could be improved, however, by the availability of more extensive BOI norms. In the present work, we collected BOI ratings for over 9,000 words. These new norms show good reliability and validity and have extensive overlap with the words used both in other lexical and semantic norms and in the available behavioral megastudies (e.g., the English ). In analyses using the new BOI norms, we found that high-BOI words tended to be more concrete, more graspable, and more strongly associated with sensory, haptic, and visual experience than are low-BOI words. When we used the new norms to predict response latencies and accuracy data from the behavioral megastudies, we found that BOI was a stronger predictor of responses in the semantic decision task than in the lexical decision task. These findings are consistent with a dynamic, multidimensional account of lexical semantics. The norms described here should be useful for future research examining the effects of sensorimotor experience on performance in tasks involving word stimuli.Keywords Body-object interaction . Lexical decision task . Semantic decision task . Sensorimotor processes . Word ratings . Word recognition In recent years, a great deal of research has explored the relationships between cognition and sensorimotor processing. This work has addressed important questions about how we learn, represent, and retrieve information about the world, and it has examined the extent to which cognition is grounded in our sensorimotor systems. Of particular relevance to the present work are studies that have investigated the role of sensorimotor information in language and cognitive processing by examining the effects of body-object interaction (BOI;

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