Front Is High and Back Is Low: Sound-Space Iconicity in Finnish

Abstract

Previous investigations have shown various interactions between spatial concepts and speech sounds. For instance, the front-high vowel [i] is associated with the concept of forward, and the back-high vowel [o] is associated with the concept of backward. Three experiments investigated whether the concepts of forward/front and backward/back are associated with high- and low-pitched vocalizations, respectively, in Finnish. In Experiments 1 and 2, the participants associated the high-pitched vocalization with the forward-directed movement and the low-pitched vocalizations with the backward-directed movement. In Experiment 3, the same effect was observed in relation to the concepts of front of and back of. We propose that these observations present a novel sound-space symbolism phenomenon in which spatial concepts of forward/front and backward/back are iconically associated with high- and low-pitched speech sounds. This observation is discussed in relation to the grounding of semantic knowledge of these spatial concepts in the movements of articulators such as relative front/back-directed movements of the tongue.