Date of Award

12-31-2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Developmental and Brain Sciences

First Advisor

Vivian Ciaramitaro

Second Advisor

Erik Blaser

Third Advisor

S. Tiffany Donaldson

Abstract

Sound-shape correspondences, also known as bouba-kiki effect, is the preferential mapping of nonsense sound like “baluma” to rounded abstract shapes while mapping nonsense sound like “takete” to spiky abstract shapes. Such association was seen for auditory and visual stimuli (AV), and auditory and tactile stimuli, which are touched but not seen (AT). Literature comparing typically-developing and early-blind adults showed AT association differ as a function of level of visual experience, and similar finding was also found comparing typically-developing adult and children. Specifically, typically-developing younger children benefited from prior AV experience of abstract shapes and nonsense sounds. While these findings suggest that vision may play an important role in the AT association in typically-developing younger children, limited works have focused on the specific factors prior visual experience contributing to the change in the strength of AT association. Current dissertation seeks to understand how prior visual experience potentially alters the haptic processing, thus influencing the AT association strength in typically-developing 6- to 8-years-old. First, I examined how 6- to 8-years-old children’s AT association change as a function of the amount and the type of prior experience (N = 183), and the result showed that AT associations strength differ as a function of the amount of prior visual experience, and this effect could not be found with repeated AT test trials. More of select non-visual prior experience highlighting the contour spikiness of the abstract shapes could yield strengthened AT association, but this effect is not as robust as prior visual experience. Then, I assessed how prior visual experience influence the haptic exploration of shape objects felt by hand but not seen in 6- to 8-years-old (N = 90), and the result showed that prior visual experience influences the efficiency of haptic exploration strategy during AT association task, and similar effect was found in participants with more versus less prior visual experiences. Lastly, I focused on the possibility of AT association circumventing the visual translation of haptic inputs by exploring the AT association between nonsense sounds and abstract objects with varied surface texture in 6- to 8-years-old. Through a series of experiment (N = 117), I did not find evidence of AT sound-texture association in early development. Taken together, my work has not only reinforced the idea that vision played an important role in AT association in early development but also contributed to the understanding of haptic processing of abstract objects in a multisensory context.

Comments

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