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 ‘u-curvy, i-pointy’ sound/shape cross-modal correspondence in all groups. However, Tones were mapped differently by people with different language backgrounds: speakers of Mandarin Chinese classified as Chinese-dominant systematically matched Tone 1 (high, steady) to the curvy shape and Tone 4 (falling) to the pointy shape, while English speakers with no knowledge of Chinese preferred to match Tone 1 (high, steady) to the pointy shape and Tone 3 (low, dipping) to the curvy shape. These effects were observed most clearly in Study 2 where tone-pairs were contrasted explicitly. These findings are in line with the dominant patterns of linguistic pitch perception for speakers of these languages (pitch-change, and pitch height, respectively). Chinese English balanced bilinguals showed a bivalent pattern, swapping between the Chinese pitch-change pattern and the English pitch-height pattern depending on the task. These findings show for that the supposedly universal pattern of mapping linguistic sounds to shape is modulated by the sensory properties of a speaker’s language system, and that people with high functioning in more than one language can dynamically shift between patterns.
Severe outbreaks of COVID-19 have changed America's landscape substantially. What's more astonishing is wearing a mask or not used to be a question for many Americans when this virus was exponentially spreading in the U.S. The present study conducted thematic analysis of mask-related news comments from six American mainstream media. The analysis indicated five major themes. These were: (1) Debates on mask effectiveness; (2) Care vs. not care about others; (3) Controversies over personal rights and freedom; (4) Masks are politicized; and (5) Mask-related anti-science phenomenon. Each theme was further discussed using relevant theoretical evidence (e.g., trust in public health measures; altruism in crises; autonomy; individualism/collectivism; trust in science) in the literary. Despite the observed selfish behaviors, divisions and increasing anti-science trends in the U.S., people should still hold deep belief in science, altruism and solidarity.
Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a series of IAT studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception.
Automatic connections between sounds and visual shapes have been documented for some time (c.f., Spence, 2011). We replicated audiovisual correspondences with simple linguistic sounds /i/ and /u/, this time produced in the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, using a modified version of the implicit association test (IAT). Although congruent blocks were significantly faster than incongruent ones (p < .001), no effect of tone congruence was observed. Since tone was an unattended stimulus dimension, we argue that attention modulates sensory congruence in implicit association tasks of this nature.
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