Simner Julia, Cuskley Christine, Kirby Simon
Department of Psychology, School of Psychology, Philosophy and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, Scotland, UK.
Perception. 2010;39(4):553-69. doi: 10.1068/p6591.
All people share implicit mappings across the senses, which give us preferences for certain sensory combinations over others (eg light colours are preferentially paired with higher-pitch sounds; Ward et al, 2006 Cortex 42 264-280). Although previous work has tended to focus on the cross-modality of vision with other senses, here we present evidence of systematic cross-modality between taste and sound. We created four sound continua representing to varying extents phonetic qualities of speech (F1, F2, voice discontinuity, and spectral balance). Sixty-five participants selected their preferred sound to accompany each of the basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty, at two different concentrations. We found significant shared preferences among our participants to map certain acoustic qualities to certain types of tastes (eg sweet tastes tend to be mapped to a lower spectral balance than sour tastes). We also found a preference for mapping certain sound qualities to different taste concentrations. Together our data provide the first detailed analysis of how phonetic features map systematically to different tastants and concentrations. We examine the roots of these mappings, and discuss how such associations might guide the ways in which human languages are used to name objects with taste.
所有人都具有跨感官的隐性映射，这使我们对某些感官组合的偏好超过其他组合（例如，浅色优先与高音调声音配对；沃德等人，2006年，《大脑皮层》42卷，264 - 280页）。尽管先前的研究倾向于关注视觉与其他感官的跨模态，但在此我们展示了味觉与声音之间系统的跨模态证据。我们创建了四个声音连续体，它们在不同程度上代表了语音的语音特征（F1、F2、语音间断性和频谱平衡）。65名参与者在两种不同浓度下，为甜、酸、苦、咸这四种基本味觉分别选择他们偏好的伴随声音。我们发现参与者之间存在显著的共同偏好，即将某些声学特征映射到某些类型的味觉上（例如，甜味往往比酸味映射到更低的频谱平衡）。我们还发现了将某些声音特征映射到不同味觉浓度的偏好。我们的数据共同提供了对语音特征如何系统地映射到不同味觉剂和浓度的首次详细分析。我们研究了这些映射的根源，并讨论了这种关联可能如何指导人类语言用于命名具有味觉的物体的方式。
