Spatial Metaphor Facilitates Word Learning

Abstract

Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more proficient at learning the word when it described a spatial attribute compared to pitch. However, once children learned the word, they extended it to the untrained dimension without feedback. Thus, children leveraged preexisting associations between space and pitch to spontaneously understand new metaphors. These results suggest that spatial metaphors may be common across languages in part because they scaffold children's acquisition of word meanings that are otherwise difficult to learn.

Figure 1.

Schematic of the paradigm in the space-to-sound condition (left) and sound-to-space condition (right). Stimuli are shown for the height condition with the novel word trained on the unmarked pole (high). Arrows are shown here for illustration purposes only, to indicate pointing by the experimenter, and the icons indicating audio frequency with squiggles were also not present during test.

Figure 2.

Children’s performance in the word training phase by age group and trained dimension. Error bars indicate 95% CIs.

Figure 3.

Children’s performance in the word extension phase by age group, extension direction, and condition. Note that the age group by direction interaction is not significant but is plotted for comparison with the training data. Error bars indicate 95% CIs.

Figure 4.

Children’s accuracy in the word comprehension task. Error bars indicate 95% CIs.