Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviors, Radboud University.
Language & Cognition and Neurobiology of Language Departments, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Cogn Sci. 2022 Feb;46(2):e13083. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13083.
Height-pitch associations are claimed to be universal and independent of language, but this claim remains controversial. The present study sheds new light on this debate with a multimodal analysis of individual sound and melody descriptions obtained in an interactive communication paradigm with speakers of Dutch and Farsi. The findings reveal that, in contrast to Dutch speakers, Farsi speakers do not use a height-pitch metaphor consistently in speech. Both Dutch and Farsi speakers' co-speech gestures did reveal a mapping of higher pitches to higher space and lower pitches to lower space, and this gesture space-pitch mapping tended to co-occur with corresponding spatial words (high-low). However, this mapping was much weaker in Farsi speakers than Dutch speakers. This suggests that cross-linguistic differences shape the conceptualization of pitch and further calls into question the universality of height-pitch associations.
音高-高度关联据称是普遍存在且独立于语言的，但这一说法仍存在争议。本研究通过对荷兰语和波斯语使用者在互动交际范式中获得的个体声音和旋律描述进行多模态分析，为这一争论提供了新的视角。研究结果表明，与荷兰语使用者不同，波斯语使用者在言语中并不始终如一的使用音高-高度隐喻。荷兰语和波斯语使用者的伴随言语手势确实揭示了较高的音高与较高的空间以及较低的音高与较低的空间之间的映射关系，并且这种手势-空间-音高映射关系往往与相应的空间词（高-低）同时出现。然而，在波斯语使用者中，这种映射关系比荷兰语使用者弱得多。这表明跨语言差异塑造了音高的概念化，进一步质疑了音高-高度关联的普遍性。
