Spatial metaphor and the development of cross-domain mappings in early childhood.

Abstract

<p class="first" id="P1">Spatial language is often used metaphorically to describe other domains, including time ( <i>long</i> sound) and pitch ( <i>high</i> sound). How does experience with these metaphors shape the ability to associate space with other domains? Here, we tested 3- to 6-year-old English-speaking children and adults with a cross-domain matching task. We probed cross-domain relations that are expressed in English metaphors for time and pitch (length-time and height-pitch), as well as relations that are unconventional in English but expressed in other languages (size-time and thickness-pitch). Participants were tested with a <i>perceptual matching task</i>, in which they matched between spatial stimuli and sounds of different durations or pitches, and a <i>linguistic matching task</i>, in which they matched between a label denoting a spatial attribute, duration, or pitch, and a picture or sound representing another dimension. Contrary to previous claims that experience with linguistic metaphors is necessary for children to make cross-domain mappings, children performed above chance for both familiar and unfamiliar relations in both tasks, as did adults. Children’s performance was also better when a label was provided for one of the dimensions, but only when making length-time, size-time, and height-pitch mappings (not thickness-pitch mappings). These findings suggest that, although experience with metaphorical language is not necessary to make cross-domain mappings, labels can promote these mappings, both when they have familiar metaphorical uses (e.g., English ‘long’ denotes both length and duration), and when they describe dimensions that share a common ordinal reference frame (e.g., size and duration, but not thickness and pitch). </p>