The importance of awareness for understanding language.

Abstract

Is consciousness required for high level cognitive processes, or can the unconscious mind perform tasks that are as complex and difficult as, for example, understanding a sentence? Recent work has argued that, yes, the unconscious mind can: Sklar et al. (2012) found that sentences, masked from consciousness using the technique of continuous flash suppression (CFS), broke into awareness more rapidly when their meanings were more unusual or more emotionally negative, even though processing the sentences’ meaning required unconsciously combining each word’s meaning. This has motivated the important claim that consciousness plays little-to-no functional role in high-level cognitive operations. Here, we aimed to replicate and extend these findings, but instead, across 10 high-powered studies, we found no evidence that the meaning of a phrase or word could be understood without awareness. We did, however, consistently find evidence that low-level perceptual features, such as sentence length and familiarity of alphabet, could be processed unconsciously. Our null findings for sentence processing are corroborated by a meta-analysis that aggregates our studies with the prior literature. We offer a potential explanation for prior positive results through a set of computational simulations, which show how the distributional characteristics of this type of CFS data, in particular its skew and heavy tail, can cause an elevated level of false positive results when common data exclusion criteria are applied. Our findings thus have practical implication for analyzing such data. More importantly, they suggest that consciousness may well be required for high-level cognitive tasks such as understanding language.

Neural capacity limits during unconscious semantic processing

“…() recently proposed that multiple word expressions can be processed without conscious awareness. However, the present findings are more consistent with subsequent studies supporting the more conservative view that consciousness is required for complex cognitive tasks such as sentence comprehension and arithmetic (Moors & Hesselmann, ; Rabagliati et al ., ).…”

Sound-Symbolism Effects in the Absence of Awareness: A Replication Study

“…Obtaining evidence for the effect in a large, independent replication study would strongly support the idea that sound-shape mapping does not require awareness. It would also suggest that suppressed word(-like) stimuli do get processed to a higher level than previously assumed (Heyman & Moors, 2014), though some researchers have posited that even semantic information can get extracted from single words under CFS (e.g., Yang & Yeh, 2011, but see Rabagliati et al, 2018, for evidence to the contrary). Failing to find a sound-symbolism congruency effect, on the other hand, would further support the idea that CFS precludes the processing of word(-like) stimuli.…”

“…Furthermore, using the same breaking CFS paradigm, Heyman and Moors (2014) were unable to obtain standard word recognition phenomena like the effect of word frequency and lexicality. A recent paper by Rabagliati, Robertson, and Carmel (2018) featuring 10 studies found no evidence that the meaning of a phrase or a word could be processed under CFS. Taken together, there is reason to believe that CFS fundamentally disrupts the processing of word-like stimuli, yet the effect reported by Hung et al (2017) arguably depends on word recognition and interpretation processes to occur under CFS.…”

Apparent evidence for unconscious sound symbolism is probably artifactual: Commentary on Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels and Moors (in press).

“…Striking recent work (Hung, Styles, & Hsieh, 2017) suggests that these mappings may have an unconscious basis, such that participants can compute the fit between a word's sound and an object's shape when both are masked from awareness. This surprising finding replicated in the pre-registered report by Heyman, Maerten, Vankrunkelsven, Voorspoels and Moors (2019), with potentially far-reaching implications for the role of awareness in language processing (Hassin, 2013;Rabagliati, Robertson, & Carmel, 2018). However, as I demonstrate, it is an artifact of the stimuli used.…”

“…Breakthrough from CFS has been used to make a number of strong claims about what can be processed without awareness, from facial emotions (Yang, Zald, & Blake, 2007) to sentence meanings (Sklar et al, 2012), but not every claim has generalized. For instance, Rabagliati et al (2018) consistently failed to replicate findings that the meanings of words NO UNCONSCIOUS SOUND SYMBOLISM 3 and phrases affected breakthrough, but did find that breakthrough was affected by low-level visual features of the stimuli (like the length of a word, or familiarity of the orthography).…”