title: Prelinguistic infants are sensitive to space-pitch associations found across cultures.
abstract: People often talk about musical pitch using spatial metaphors. In English, for instance, pitches can be "high" or "low" (i.e., height-pitch association), whereas in other languages, pitches are described as "thin" or "thick" (i.e., thickness-pitch association). According to results from psychophysical studies, metaphors in language can shape people's nonlinguistic space-pitch representations. But does language establish mappings between space and pitch in the first place, or does it only modify preexisting associations? To find out, we tested 4-month-old Dutch infants' sensitivity to height-pitch and thickness-pitch mappings using a preferential-looking paradigm. The infants looked significantly longer at cross-modally congruent stimuli for both space-pitch mappings, which indicates that infants are sensitive to these associations before language acquisition. The early presence of space-pitch mappings means that these associations do not originate from language. Instead, language builds on preexisting mappings, changing them gradually via competitive associative learning. Space-pitch mappings that are language-specific in adults develop from mappings that may be universal in infants.
authors.affiliation: Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Department of Rehabilitation and Special Education, University of Cologne sarah_dolscheid@gmx.de.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dolscheid
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen.
authors.forename: Sabine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hunnius
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The University of Chicago.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Casasanto
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Center for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen.
authors.forename: Asifa
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Majid
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010898:Pitch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D011601:Psychophysics / Q000379:methods; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology
keywords: cross-modal associations; infant perception; metaphor; musical pitch; space