Page 50 - Summer2022

SOUNDS FULL OF MEANING communication. It is an advantage to use both because they have different affordances. On one hand, those affordances are situational. Vocal calls are useful to reach a distant receiver, and visual communication might be preferred in close communication or even demanded when we do not wish to attract the attention of others. On the other hand, different affordances relate to the expression of different sen- sory dimensions. Something visual, such as the shape of an object, is easier to convey using gestures, whereas some- thing auditory, like the tick tock of a clock, may be easier expressed with vocalizations. The connection between the modalities, exposed by cross-modal correspondences, only proves that they are both vital and intertwined. Although it has been pointed out that for human communication it is multimodal at the core, this may also be true for other primates when communicating. Concluding Remarks Sounds can become meaningful when they are fused with other sensory information. This property was important to get language off the ground and goes against the tra- ditional assumption in phonology that sounds are only described as meaning-distinguishing units. We provide examples for robust cross-modal correspondences of sound-to-vision and sound-to-touch mappings. Cross- modal correspondences are part of our daily life. They can occur in child-directed speech, in product names, and in fictional characters of cartoons or movies. Sound- to-size correspondence is also meaningful in the animal kingdom. Perceiving the size of a predator in the vocal call of its voice (sound-to-size mapping) can become a matter of survival. However, interdisciplinary work might be necessary to move comparative studies on humans and primates forward because most empirical work on animals focuses on either auditory vocalization or visual gestures. 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