FIGURE 1.

Example stimuli presentation series. In each experimental condition, participants were exposed to 45 successive stimuli, consisting of images paired with an auditory utterance of five monosyllabic words. Each image category – humans, non-human animals, mountains – was linked only to a specific word (“target label”) randomly assigned to that referential category (different for different subjects). In this example, /mi/ always co-occurs with the category “humans,” /ga/ with “non-human animals,” and /lu/ with “mountains” (underlined in the figure). Due to copyright and legal concerns, in this example we used copyright-free pictures instead of the original pictures from the National Geographic Website.