The sound of thickness: Prelinguistic infants' associations of space and pitch
Publication year
2012Publisher
Austin, TX : Cognitive Science Society
ISBN
9780976831884
In
Miyake, N.; et al. (ed.), CogSci 2012: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 306-311Publication type
Article in monograph or in proceedings

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Editor(s)
Miyake, N.
et al.
Organization
SW OZ DCC PL
SW OZ DCC CO
Communicatie- en informatiewetenschappen
Former Organization
Bedrijfscommunicatie
Languages used
English (eng)
Book title
Miyake, N.; et al. (ed.), CogSci 2012: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Page start
p. 306
Page end
p. 311
Subject
Action, intention, and motor control; DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 2: Perception, Action and Control; Language in Society; Non-nativeness in Communication; The study of olfactory language and cognition across diverse cultures, as well as within specialist communities such as perfumiers and wine-tasters (Vici)Abstract
People often talk about musical pitch in terms of spatial metaphors. In English, for instance, pitches can be high or low, whereas in other languages pitches are described as thick or thin. According to psychophysical studies, metaphors in language can also shape people’s nonlinguistic space-pitch representations. But does language establish mappings between space and pitch in the first place or does it modify preexisting associations? Here we tested 4-month-old Dutch infants’ sensitivity to height-pitch and thickness-pitch mappings in two preferential looking tasks. Dutch infants looked significantly longer at cross-modally congruent stimuli in both experiments, indicating that infants are sensitive to space-pitch associations prior to language. This early presence of space-pitch mappings suggests that these associations do not originate from language. Rather, language may build upon pre-existing mappings and change them gradually via some form of competitive associative learning.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [202605]
- Electronic publications [100801]
- Faculty of Arts [23878]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [27089]
- Open Access publications [69536]
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