Stuck in a metaphor: English and Turkish speakers’ cross-modal associations for pitch

We aimed to test predictions from the Hierarchical Mental Metaphors Theory (HMMT; Casasanto, 2016; Casasanto & Bottini, 2014), with regard to pitch metaphors among English and Turkish speakers. Languages differ in metaphors to refer to pitch (e.g., in English “high” and “low” refer to both spatial concepts and pitch). According to HMMT, adults have access to cross-modal mappings that were available in infancy; language use increases the activation of the mapping underlying the pitch metaphor in their language. In the present studies, adults were asked to indicate whether a tone (high/low) went with various visual stimuli (e.g., high/low, thin/thick, pointy/round). In Study 1, the results did not support the prediction that English speakers would have greater activation of the pitch-height metaphor in their language than metaphors that cross-modal mappings not in their language. In Study 2, English speakers could learn incongruent pitch-thickness mapping easily yet found it hard to learn incongruent pitch-height mapping. With speakers of Turkish, a language that associates pitch with thickness, Study 3 replicated that it is hard to learn incongruent pitch-spatial metaphor mapping. Further, contrary to earlier studies suggesting that language affects pitch-height mapping more strongly than pitch-thickness mapping, Turkish speakers in the current study effectively learned pitch-height mapping. These results suggest that the habitual use of pitch metaphors in a language affects the conceptualization of pitch, particularly when switching from the pitch-spatial metaphor mapping encoded in one's native language rather than learning a new pitch-spatial metaphor mapping.