Glyph guessing for ‘oo’ and ‘ee’: Spatial frequency information in sound symbolic matching for ancient and unfamiliar scripts

In three experiments, we asked whether diverse scripts contain interpretable information about the speech sounds they represent. When presented with a pair of unfamiliar letters, adult readers correctly guess which is/i/ (the ‘ee’ sound in ‘feet’), and which is/u/ (the ‘oo’ sound in ‘shoe’) at rates higher than expected by chance, as shown in a large sample of Singaporean university students (Experiment 1) and replicated in a larger sample of international Internet users (Experiment 2). To uncover what properties of the letters contribute to different scripts’ ‘guessability,’ we analysed the visual spatial frequencies in each letter (Experiment 3). We predicted that the lower spectral frequencies in the formants of the vowel/u/ would pattern with lower spatial frequencies in the corresponding letters. Instead, we found that across all spatial frequencies, the letter with more black/white cycles (i.e. more ink) was more likely to be guessed as/u/, and the larger the difference between the glyphs in a pair, the higher the script’s guessability. We propose that diverse groups of humans across historical time and geographical space tend to employ similar iconic strategies for representing speech in visual form, and provide norms for letter pairs from 56 diverse scripts.