Spatially Upward and Emotionally Uncertain: A Pilot Study on Mental Representations of Lexical Tones
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study investigated cross-modal correspondences between Cantonese tones and two dimensions: (1) spatial motion and (2) emotional valence, via a forced-choice mapping task on Hong Kong native speakers. Results show that the two contour tones (rising and falling contours) could be reliably matched with motions (upward and downward) that are congruent with pitch trajectories; and in contrast, the correspondence between contour tones and emotion valence (rising tone is positive and falling tone is negative) was less robust and limited for selective vowels. In summary, our findings indicate that beyond arbitrary form-meaning correspondence, vertical spatial information, both concrete (motion) and abstract (valence), are also encoded in lexical tones of Hong Kong Cantonese, but that the relative strengths of the two types of correspondences were not equivalent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".