Journal article
Prokofiev was (almost) right: a cross-cultural investigation of auditory-conceptual associations in Peter and the Wolf
- Abstract:
- Over recent decades, studies investigating cross-modal correspondences have documented the existence of a wide range of consistent cross-modal associations between simple auditory and visual stimuli or dimensions (e.g., pitch-lightness). Far fewer studies have investigated the association between complex and realistic auditory stimuli and visually presented concepts (e.g., musical excerpts-animals). Surprisingly, however, there is little evidence concerning the extent to which these associations are shared across cultures. To address this gap in the literature, two experiments using a set of stimuli based on Prokofiev’s symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf are reported. In Experiment 1, 293 participants from several countries and with very different language backgrounds rated the association between the musical excerpts, images and words representing the story’s characters (namely, bird, duck, wolf, cat, and grandfather). The results revealed that participants tended to consistently associate the wolf and the bird with the corresponding musical excerpt, while the stimuli of other characters were not consistently matched across participants. Remarkably, neither the participants’ cultural background, nor their musical expertise affected the ratings. In Experiment 2, 104 participants were invited to rate each stimulus on eight emotional features. The results revealed that the emotional profiles associated with the music and with the concept of the wolf and the bird were perceived as more consistent between observers than the emotional profiles associated with the music and the concept of the duck, the cat, and the grandpa. Taken together, these findings therefore suggest that certain auditory-conceptual associations are perceived consistently across cultures and may be mediated by emotional associations.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Reviewed (other)
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.4MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.3758/s13423-023-02435-7
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Psychonomic Bulletin & Review More from this journal
- Volume:
- 31
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 1735–1744
- Place of publication:
- United States
- Publication date:
- 2024-01-24
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-12-10
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1531-5320
- ISSN:
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1069-9384
- Pmid:
-
38267741
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1615161
- Local pid:
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pubs:1615161
- Deposit date:
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2024-04-08
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Di Stefano et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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