BLIP Lab research published last week shows that the language a person grows up hearing changes their sensory experience of the world. And it’s not just the sense of hearing – connections between the senses are also affected: When people who speak Mandarin Chinese listen to vowels “ee” and “oo” in the different tones of Chinese, they make different decisions about which sound should go with which shape – and some of their decisions are exactly the opposite to the decisions made by people who don’t speak any tone languages! You can find out more about this effect, and why we think it occurs in our our BLIP Bites – plain language mini research reports: The Point of Pitch.

Original Research article: Shang, N. and S. J. Styles (2017). “Is a high tone pointy? Degree of pitch-change in lexical tone predicts of sound-to-shape correspondences in Chinese bilinguals.” Frontiers 8(2139): 1. Open Access Link: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02139