| Summary: | In a world where people are constantly bombarded with sensory information across modalities, it is refreshing to note that some of these seemingly unrelated information have nonarbitrary associations. A large body of crossmodal congruence research has illustrated that mapping biases often exist across sensory modalities. Specifically, certain acoustic features in speech sounds are associated with attributes in the visual modality such as shape and size, as evidenced by a consistent tendency for people to match words such as bouba to rounded shapes and maluma to jagged, spiky shapes. With a large body of research demonstrating sound symbolism and its effects on short term perceptual tasks, we are particularly interested in whether these established sound-object correspondences affect adult learning. In a novel experimental paradigm designed to maximise ecological validity, we investigated if crossmodal congruence between labels, images and medical information of fictional viruses will enhance learning. Adult learners (58 undergraduates) demonstrated learning of recently presented mappings and learnt congruent mappings better than incongruent mappings. As expected sound-object congruence was found to facilitate learning while incongruence inhibited learning. We discuss the practical implications of these findings in pedagogy where an enhancement of crossmodal congruence may maximise learning effectiveness.
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