> That the underlying study was reported in a rather minor journal Cognition is one of the top journals in cognitive science. Definitely not a minor journal fo

> That the underlying study was reported in a rather minor journal Cognition is one of the top journals in cognitive science. Definitely not a minor journal for this kind of work, and plenty of their reviewers are statistically competent. So my prior would not be that the stats here are bogus. I share your skepticism of their result about more synesthetic people being more able to guess the meanings of foreign words. The effect size there looks tiny, the motivation is a bunch of hand-waving, and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't replicate. On the other hand I'm inclined to believe their result that people can guess the meanings of certain foreign certain words with above-chance accuracy (about 60% for big vs. small). It's just a version of the well-replicated bouba/kiki effect[1], plus the idea that this can influence words in a language, which doesn't seem far-fetched at all. What I'm most concerned about is that people might be picking up on similarities between words beyond what the authors identify as "cognates". The sample languages are Albanian, Dutch, Gujarati, Indonesian, Korean, Mandarin, Romanian, Tamil, Turkish, and Yoruba. 4 of those are Indo-European and might have obscure etymological relations that show up as a few overlapping letters. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect