Weighing up the evidence for sound symbolism: Distributional properties predict cue strength

It is well-established that there are relationships between word meaning and certain letters or phonemes, a phenomenon known as sound symbolism. Most sound symbolism studies have relied on a small stimulus set chosen to maximize the probability of finding an effect for a particular semantic category. Attempts to assign weights to sound symbolic cues have been limited by a methodology that has relied largely on forced contrast judgments, which do...