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What makes a shape "baba"? The shape features prioritized in sound-shape correspondence change with development
Hiu Mei Chow1, Vivian Ciaramitaro1
1Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA 02125, USA.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|November 27, 2018
Summary
Children aged 6-8 prioritize shape features like protrusion number over contour spikiness in sound-shape correspondence. However, this bias shifts when spikiness is contextually highlighted, suggesting developmental changes in perceptual processing influence crossmodal associations.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Crossmodal Perception
Background:
- Crossmodal sound-shape correspondence, exemplified by the bouba-kiki effect, links abstract shapes with nonsense words across cultures.
- Sensitivity to these sound-shape pairings may develop over time, but the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how developmental changes in shape feature weighting (spikiness, protrusions) influence sound-shape correspondence.
- To determine if children and adults prioritize different visual features when associating sounds with shapes.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Participants matched nonsense words to shapes with manipulated contour spikiness and protrusion characteristics.
- Experiment 2: Contour spikiness was emphasized by presenting round and spiky shapes concurrently to assess contextual influence.
Main Results:
- Adults associated /i/ sounds with spiky shapes and prioritized contour spikiness.
- Six- to 8-year-olds initially prioritized protrusion number, unlike 9- to 11-year-olds and adults.
- Highlighting contour spikiness in Experiment 2 enabled 6- to 8-year-olds to associate sounds based on this feature.
Conclusions:
- Younger children (6-8 years) exhibit different visual feature biases in sound-shape correspondence compared to adults.
- Contextual cues can modulate these biases, allowing children to adopt adult-like feature prioritization.
- Developmental shifts in visual shape processing and contextual information extraction contribute to changing sensitivity in crossmodal correspondences.