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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

We take this as evidence that some of the “mental representations” evoked during language comprehension may share an underlying neural process with those evoked through vision: theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling. /fin

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Indeed, we found evidence of this – TG-PAC within this ROI increased with degree of change to the linguistically-evoked object. This suggests its functional role in maintaining the object in a way that is, interestingly, sensitive to (dis)similarity among that object’s states.

Two-dimensional scatterplot with a regression line showing that TG-PAC strength increases with degree of change to the object.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

… if the same TG-PAC effect surfaces (with the same topography across space and frequencies) in the sentence comprehension task, people might be using the same neural process to maintain a linguistically-evoked onion in mind as a visually-evoked one.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Analysis: we first identified a cluster of increased TG-PAC in the working memory task (relative to a control task) resembling what’s been previously demonstrated in the literature. This cluster was then used as an effect localizer for the sentence comprehension task – we reasoned that …

Image depicting spatial topography of the TG-PAC cluster identified by our working memory task. Red circle depicting a top-down view of the head, with cluster consisting of left temporal electrodes.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

They also did a sentence comprehension task, reading sentences like “the chef chopped the onion, and then he smelled it”. We varied the degree of change to the objects in these sentences (e.g., weighed the onion, folded the paper, inflated the balloon, chopped the onion).

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

We tested this using EEG. Participants performed a simple visual working memory task – see a brief image, hold it in mind for a few seconds, then verify whether a second image was identical to the one they’d just seen.

Schematic describing the working memory experiment flow across four panels. First panel shows a line drawing of an airplane (displayed for 200ms). Second panel shows a single dot, representing a delay for 3000ms. Third panel shows a slightly different line drawing of an airplane for 200ms. Fourth panel shows response window - participants respond whether the first and third images were identical.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This suggests we keep these object-states, bound to the same object, around in the mind as the discourse unfolds. How do our brains accomplish this? We suggest it recruits a neural signal previously demonstrated in visual working memory: theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling (TG-PAC).

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

… we mentally “select” between these states of the onion; the more dissimilar these object-states are, the more competition is engendered in the brain (e.g., chop the onion > weigh the onion).

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If the object is later mentioned again (e.g., “[…] then he will smell the onion”), we have to retrieve the onion in its appropriate state to integrate into the sentence. Prior work shows that, during this retrieval, …

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Consider this sentence: “the chef will chop the onion”. The onion changes state from intact to chopped, but we know both states are the same onion – we might say both object-states are bound to the same object token during the event.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

New paper alert! Evidence of a shared neural signal for visually and linguistically evoked object representations. To appear in Brain and Language – free link until Nov 14, 2026: authors.elsevier.com/a/1nqn5,28iJ...

authors.elsevier.com

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Very cool! In case others haven't pointed it out, it seems you can get *multiple* overlapping illusory waves. Or maybe my perception is wonky

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

I'll be giving a talk on this at #CogSci2026 (Talk Session 14: Semantic Structure) on July 24. Will also be in Rio a couple days before the conference, if anyone would like to explore the city together!

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Stay tuned for our next paper, "Breaking the "Breaking the Bouba-Kiki Effect" Effect"

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

We find this effect is strong enough to override baseline sound-symbolic preferences, and speculate that it suggests a general cognitive principle of similarity alignment across modalities.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

In sum, we report that adults prefer similar labels to refer to similar concepts. This is surprising, because things in the real world that are perceptually similar often have dissimilar labels, and vice versa (e.g., rat-mouse vs. house-mouse).

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

We found participants’ responses were more similar — both to the context label (toku) and to each other — when the creatures were perceptually similar, suggesting that the label-similarity effect generalizes to production.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

We wondered if this effect might be an artifact of the experiment design (i.e. an alternative forced-choice task). So in Experiment 3, we asked participants to *generate* their own labels for these creatures.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Notably, the effect is strong enough to *reverse* canonical sound symbolic preferences. If participants hadn’t seen the toku before, they were more likely to say the spiky creature was the teki. But if they had seen the toku, this preference was flipped.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Participants preferred “teki” to map to the blobby creature when they had seen a similar-looking creature called a toku. This demonstrates a label-similarity effect in adults: people prefer similar labels mapping onto similar stimuli.

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Then, we showed them two other creatures and asked them which was a teki.

Black and white drawings of two creatures. Left: a spiky, angular creature. Right: a bunny-like creature like the "toku" in the previous post. Text above the two creatures says: "Which is more similar to your idea of a teki?"

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Try it for yourself! In Experiments 1 and 2, we showed participants novel creatures like the following:

Black and white drawing of a bunny-like creature, accompanied by the text: "This is a toku. This toku lives on a distant planet with two other alien species […] Think about what a teki and a boma might look like."

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Here, we examine another source of non-arbitrariness: the similarity *structure* between labels and referents. For example, if you learn about a novel creature called a “toku”, what do you think a “teki” might look like?

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

But sometimes that mapping is non-arbitrary. One prominent example is sound symbolism (i.e. the bouba-kiki effect), where the linguistic form of the label “resembles” its referent. People have intuitions about some kinds of labels mapping onto certain shapes (e.g. “bouba” with round shapes).

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

What is the relationship between a label and the concept it refers to? Sometimes, the mapping between the two is arbitrary. For example, there is no more reason to call the thing that looks like a dog “dog” (English), as opposed to “chien” (French) or “gou” (Mandarin).

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

First post on bluesky! Announcing a new preprint with @eiling.bsky.social : We “broke” the bouba-kiki effect. osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Wesley Leong @wesleyleong.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

I was going to bring up Kaiser's work as well! Here's the abstract I was thinking of: hsp2025.github.io/abstracts/31...

hsp2025.github.io

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