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Semantic gender norms are presented for 24,037 Dutch words. Eighty participants rated 6,017 words each on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from feminine to masculine. Each word was rated by 10 male and 10 female participants. The collected norms show high reliability and correlate well with similar norms in English. We show that semantic gender is distinct from other lexical dimensions such as valence, arousal, dominance, concreteness, and age of acquisition. Semantic gender is not the same as the grammatical gender of words, either. The collected norms can be predicted accurately using a semantic space based on word association data. A dimension explaining a good amount of variance is present in this space, indicating that semantic gender is an important component of the human meaning system.

People have been shown to link particular sounds with particular shapes. For instance, the round-sounding nonword bouba tends to be associated with curved shapes, whereas the sharp-sounding nonword kiki is deemed to be related to angular shapes. People's tendency to associate sounds and shapes has been observed across different languages. In the present study, we reexamined the claim by Hung, Styles, and Hsieh (2017) that such sound-shape mappings can occur before an individual becomes aware of the visual stimuli. More precisely, we replicated their first experiment, in which congruent and incongruent stimuli (e.g., bouba presented in a round shape or an angular shape, respectively) were rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression. The results showed that congruent combinations, on average, broke suppression faster than incongruent combinations, thus providing converging evidence for Hung and colleagues' assertions. Collectively, these findings now provide a solid basis from which to explore the boundary conditions of the effect. ispartof: Psychological Science vol:30 issue:11 ispartof: location:United States status: Published online