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Köhler (1929) famously reported a bias in people's matching of nonsense words to novel object shapes, pointing to possible naïve expectations about language structure. The bias has been attributed to synesthesia-like coactivation of motor or somatosensory areas involved in vowel articulation and visual areas involved in perceiving object shape (Ramachandran using novel, randomly generated words and images; and presenting words either visually or aurally. In both experiments, subjects' image-matching responses showed evidence of tracking the consonant content of words. We discuss the possibility that vowels and consonants both play a role and consider some methodological factors that might influence their relative effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).
Nielsen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.