Abstract
Studies investigating cross-modal correspondences between auditory pitch and visual shapes have shown children and adults consistently match high pitch to pointy shapes and low pitch to curvy shapes, yet no studies have investigated linguistic-uses of pitch. In the present study, we used a bouba/kiki style task to investigate the sound/shape mappings for Tones of Mandarin Chinese, for three groups of participants with different language backgrounds. We recorded the vowels [i] and [u] articulated in each of the four tones of Mandarin Chinese. In Study 1 a single auditory stimulus was presented with two images (one curvy, one spiky). In Study 2 a single image was presented with two auditory stimuli differing only in tone. Participants were asked to select the best match in an online ‘Quiz.’ Across both studies, we replicated the previously observed ‘u-curvy, i-pointy’ sound/shape cross-modal correspondence in all groups. However, Tones were mapped differently by people with different language backgrounds: speakers of Mandarin Chinese classified as Chinese-dominant systematically matched Tone 1 (high, steady) to the curvy shape and Tone 4 (falling) to the pointy shape, while English speakers with no knowledge of Chinese preferred to match Tone 1 (high, steady) to the pointy shape and Tone 3 (low, dipping) to the curvy shape. These effects were observed most clearly in Study 2 where tone-pairs were contrasted explicitly. These findings are in line with the dominant patterns of linguistic pitch perception for speakers of these languages (pitch-change, and pitch height, respectively). Chinese English balanced bilinguals showed a bivalent pattern, swapping between the Chinese pitch-change pattern and the English pitch-height pattern depending on the task. These findings show for that the supposedly universal pattern of mapping linguistic sounds to shape is modulated by the sensory properties of a speaker’s language system, and that people with high functioning in more than one language can dynamically shift between patterns.
Highlights
For almost 90 years, it has been recognized that people from a variety of backgrounds tend to make the same choices about which nonsense words ‘should’ have which meanings, a trait that seems to be more-or-less universal
Given the extensive literature on cross-modal correspondences between pitch and visual shapes (O’Boyle and Tarte, 1980; Marks, 1987; Walker et al, 2010; Parise and Spence, 2012), the second author, a native English speaker who does not speak Chinese, predicted that the high-pitched Tone 1 would be matched with pointy shapes, while the low-pitched Tone 3 would be matched with smooth curvy shapes
In addition to the vowel effect, Chinese speakers made more curvy choices for [u] stimuli articulated in Tone 1 than in Tone 4, which is consistent with the previous literature on Chinese speakers’ sensitivity to pitch change (Jongman et al, 2006; Singh et al, 2014), and demonstrates for the first time that this perceptual sensitivity is evident in crossmodal perception using two large samples of homogeneous Chinese speakers
Summary
For almost 90 years, it has been recognized that people from a variety of backgrounds tend to make the same choices about which nonsense words ‘should’ have which meanings, a trait that seems to be more-or-less universal. Given the fact that so many people in the world speak tone languages and sound symbolism has not been investigated systematically using tone languages, the present study explores cross-modal correspondences between Mandarin tones and visual shapes in two highly systematic investigations of bouba/kiki-type soundshape matching. Given the extensive literature on cross-modal correspondences between pitch and visual shapes (O’Boyle and Tarte, 1980; Marks, 1987; Walker et al, 2010; Parise and Spence, 2012), the second author, a native English speaker who does not speak Chinese, predicted that the high-pitched Tone 1 would be matched with pointy shapes, while the low-pitched Tone 3 would be matched with smooth curvy shapes. The present study is the first to investigate lexical tones in systematically controlled sound symbolic selection paradigm (a modified bouba/kiki task)
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