Affiliation:
1. Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin
2. Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin
3. Department of Psychology, Cornell University
4. Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University
5. School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University
Abstract
Prior investigations have demonstrated that people tend to link pseudowords such as bouba to rounded shapes and kiki to spiky shapes, but the cognitive processes underlying this matching bias have remained controversial. Here, we present three experiments underscoring the fundamental role of emotional mediation in this sound–shape mapping. Using stimuli from key previous studies, we found that kiki-like pseudowords and spiky shapes, compared with bouba-like pseudowords and rounded shapes, consistently elicit higher levels of affective arousal, which we assessed through both subjective ratings (Experiment 1, N = 52) and acoustic models implemented on the basis of pseudoword material (Experiment 2, N = 70). Crucially, the mediating effect of arousal generalizes to novel pseudowords (Experiment 3, N = 64, which was preregistered). These findings highlight the role that human emotion may play in language development and evolution by grounding associations between abstract concepts (e.g., shapes) and linguistic signs (e.g., words) in the affective system.
Funder
national science foundation
Direct Exchange Program between Freie Universität Berlin and Cornell University
Cited by
19 articles.
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