Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Spatial language is often used metaphorically to describe other domains, including time (a long sound) and pitch (a high sound). How does experience with these metaphors shape the associations we make across disparate domains? Here, we tested 3- to 6-year-old English-speaking children and adults with a cross-domain matching task that assessed space-time and space-pitch mappings. We tested spatial relations that are expressed in English metaphors for time and pitch, as well as metaphors that are unfamiliar to English speakers, but expressed in other languages. Participants performed a perceptual matching task, in which they matched pictures and sounds, and a linguistic matching task, in which they matched pictures or sounds to verbal labels. Adults readily matched between space and time and between space and pitch, using relations expressed by both familiar and unfamiliar metaphors. Children showed an advantage for linguistic matching compared to perceptual matching, but their performance was similarly unaffected by metaphor familiarity. Together, these results suggest that spatial language promotes the development of cross-domain associations, and that experience with particular spatial metaphors is not required to produce this benefit.