The findings confirm a familiar vowel pattern: back rounded vowels tend toward rounder, larger images while front unrounded vowels lean toward sharper, smaller ones. Beyond vowels, the study uncovers effects tied to Mandarin’s consonant system and its lexical tones. Voiced versus unvoiced consonants align with perceived shape, aspirated contrasts influence perceived size, and the four Mandarin tones fall along a gradient from round to angular and from larger to smaller. These patterns held up after the authors accounted for basic acoustic factors, which strengthens the case that phonemic categories themselves guide cross-sensory associations.
Why this matters for human potential and inclusion is practical and surprising. If phonemic features steer visual expectations, then sound symbolism could shape early learning, branding, interface design, or how multilingual communities name things. The Mandarin-specific effects remind us that language experience sculpts perception, which raises questions about how other tonal or phonologically diverse languages map their sounds to sight. Follow the link to explore experimental details and consider what these mappings imply for education, design, and communication across languages.
Abstract
Certain speech sounds are consistently associated with visual properties such as shape and size, a phenomenon known as crossmodal correspondences. Well-established examples demonstrate that the vowel /u/ is often linked to rounder and larger objects, while /i/ is associated with more angular and smaller ones. However, most previous research utilized English pseudowords, leaving a gap in our understanding of how these correspondences manifest in tonal languages. The current study extends the investigation to Mandarin Chinese, a tonal language, to examine the roles of vowels, consonants, and lexical tones in sound–shape and sound–size correspondences. Participants heard consonant-vowel-tone syllables and rated each on a 5-point scale with rounder/more angular shapes or larger/smaller icons at opposite ends. The results confirmed the established vowel effect: /u/ was associated with rounder and larger patterns than /i/. Results for consonants demonstrated that the voiced–unvoiced contrast predicted sound–shape judgments, while the aspirated–unaspirated contrast, which is less prominent in English, influenced sound–size judgments. Lexical tones also revealed systematic effects, with Tone 1 (flat), Tone 2 (rising), Tone 3 (falling–rising), and Tone 4 (falling) progressively matched from rounder to more angular shapes, while Tones 1 and 2 were linked to larger sizes than Tones 3 and 4. These phonemic features reliably predicted crossmodal correspondences even when controlling for acoustic properties, suggesting robust mappings between phonemic and visual representations. This study highlights the common vowel effects across Mandarin and English while revealing unique influences of consonants and lexical tones, underscoring the role of language experience in shaping crossmodal correspondences.
