ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
Is a High Tone Pointy? Speakers of Different Languages Match Mandarin Chinese Tones to Visual Shapes Differently.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Falling Tone That Rolls Down the Hill and Gets Slumped: Vertical Mapping of Lexical Tones with Motion and Valence.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- The affective iconicity of segment and tone in Standard Chinese.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- The Bouba-Kiki effect is predicted by sound properties but not speech properties.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Emotional responses of Korean and Chinese women to Hangul phonemes to the gender of an artificial intelligence voice.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Implicit Association Test (IAT) Studies Investigating Pitch-Shape Audiovisual Cross-modal Associations Across Language Groups.Cognitive science · 2023Article
- The maluma/takete effect is late: No longitudinal evidence for shape sound symbolism in the first year.PloS one · 2023Article
- Japanese Sound-Symbolic Words for Representing the Hardness of an Object Are Judged Similarly by Japanese and English Speakers.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Cross-Modal Perception of Noise-in-Music: Audiences Generate Spiky Shapes in Response to Auditory Roughness in a Novel Electroacoustic Concert Setting.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Studies investigating cross-modal correspondences between auditory pitch and visual shapes have shown children and adults consistently match high pitch to pointy shapes and low pitch to curvy shapes, yet no studies have investigated linguistic-uses of pitch. In the present study, we used a bouba/kiki style task to investigate the sound/shape mappings for Tones of Mandarin Chinese, for three groups of participants with different language backgrounds. We recorded the vowels [i] and [u] articulated in each of the four tones of Mandarin Chinese. In Study 1 a single auditory stimulus was presented with two images (one curvy, one spiky). In Study 2 a single image was presented with two auditory stimuli differing only in tone. Participants were asked to select the best match in an online 'Quiz.' Across both studies, we replicated the previously observed '
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