Shayan Shakila, Ozturk Ozge, Bowerman Melissa, Majid Asifa
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Dev Sci. 2014 Jul;17(4):636-43. doi: 10.1111/desc.12157. Epub 2014 Mar 17.
Pitch is often described metaphorically: for example, Farsi and Turkish speakers use a 'thickness' metaphor (low sounds are 'thick' and high sounds are 'thin'), while German and English speakers use a height metaphor ('low', 'high'). This study examines how child and adult speakers of Farsi, Turkish, and German map pitch and thickness using a cross-modal association task. All groups, except for German children, performed significantly better than chance. German-speaking adults' success suggests the pitch-to-thickness association can be learned by experience. But the fact that German children were at chance indicates that this learning takes time. Intriguingly, Farsi and Turkish children's performance suggests that learning cross-modal associations can be boosted through experience with consistent metaphorical mappings in the input language.
例如，说波斯语和土耳其语的人会使用“厚度”隐喻（低音是“厚的”，高音是“薄的”），而说德语和英语的人则使用高度隐喻（“低”“高”）。本研究通过一项跨模态联想任务，考察了说波斯语、土耳其语和德语的儿童及成人如何将音高与厚度进行映射。除了说德语的儿童外，所有组的表现都显著高于随机水平。说德语的成年人取得成功表明，音高与厚度之间的关联可以通过经验习得。但说德语的儿童处于随机水平这一事实表明，这种学习需要时间。有趣的是，说波斯语和土耳其语的儿童的表现表明，通过接触输入语言中一致的隐喻映射，跨模态联想的学习可以得到促进。
