Both chimpanzees and humans associate low-pitched sounds with darkness and high-pitched sounds with brightness, suggests joint research by Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute and Charite -- Universitatsmedizin Berlin.
Across the world's languages, light colors are associated with high pitches and dark colors are associated with low pitches. For example, in Spanish, "white voice" is used to express a high-pitched voice, and in German, "dark voice" is used to express a low-pitched voice. The reason for the trend is unknown, but it has been posited as an inborn trait or the result of language and culture influencing each other.
In the latest research it was tested whether the same trend could be seen in chimpanzees, who are without language.
Six chimpanzees were taught to choose the color, black or white, that matched a figure that had been briefly shown on a computer screen. Researchers then began playing either high-pitched or low-pitched sounds while the chimpanzees were testing. When the correct answer was black but the sound played was high-pitched, or the correct answer was white but the sound was low-pitched, the rate of mistaken answers increased.
For 33 tested humans, although there were almost no mistaken answers, response times were slower when the sounds and colors didn't "match." The results appear to show that both humans and chimpanzees associate brightness with high pitch and darkness with low pitch.
Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute's Ikuma Adachi said, "It's not only for brightness and darkness; the sounds that are associated with round shapes and pointed shapes are also different. The connections between certain sounds and certain world phenomena may have been an early step toward the birth of language."
The research has been carried in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(Mainichi Japan) December 6, 2011
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