Hoshi Hideyuki, Kwon Nahyun, Akita Kimi, Auracher Jan
Department of Language and Literature, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany.
Department of English Linguistics, Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University, Japan.
Iperception. 2019 Jul 12;10(4):2041669519861981. doi: 10.1177/2041669519861981. eCollection 2019 Jul-Aug.
We tested the influence of perceptual features on semantic associations between the acoustic characteristics of vowels and the notion of size. To this end, we designed an experiment in which we manipulated size on two dissociable levels: the physical size of the pictures presented during the experiment (perceptual level) and the implied size of the objects depicted in the pictures (semantic level). Participants performed an Implicit Association Test in which the pictures of small objects were larger than those of large objects - that is, the actual size ratio on the semantic level was inverted on the perceptual level. Our results suggest that participants matched visual and acoustic stimuli in accordance with the content of the pictures (i.e., the inferred size of the depicted object), whereas directly perceivable features (i.e., the physical size of the picture) had only a marginal influence on participants' performance. Moreover, as the experiment has been conducted at two different sites (Japan and Germany), the results also suggest that the participants' cultural background or mother tongue had only a negligible influence on the effect. Our results, therefore, support the assumption that associations across sensory modalities can be motivated by the semantic interpretation of presemantic stimuli.
我们测试了感知特征对元音声学特征与大小概念之间语义关联的影响。为此，我们设计了一项实验，在实验中我们在两个可分离的层面上操纵大小：实验期间呈现的图片的物理大小（感知层面）和图片中描绘的物体的隐含大小（语义层面）。参与者进行了一项内隐联想测验，其中小物体的图片比大物体的图片大——也就是说，语义层面上的实际大小比例在感知层面上被颠倒了。我们的结果表明，参与者根据图片内容（即所描绘物体的推断大小）匹配视觉和听觉刺激，而直接可感知的特征（即图片的物理大小）对参与者的表现只有边际影响。此外，由于实验是在两个不同地点（日本和德国）进行的，结果还表明参与者的文化背景或母语对该效应的影响可以忽略不计。因此，我们的结果支持这样一种假设，即跨感觉模态的关联可以由前语义刺激的语义解释驱动。
