A sweet sound? Food names reveal implicit associations between taste and pitch

Sounds (high- and low-pitched) have been shown to be implicitly associated with basic tastes (sour and bitter see Crisinel and Spence, 2009 Neuroscience Letters 464 39-42) In the present study, a version of the implicit association test was used to assess the strength of the association between high-pitched sounds and names of sweet-tasting foodstuffs, and between low-pitched sounds and names of salty-tasting. foodstuffs (experiment 1) A similar task, the go/no-go association task was then used to evaluate the relative strengths of these associations (experiment 2) Analysis of the sensitivity of participants' responses suggested that both sour- and sweet-tasting (names of) food items were associated with high-pitched sounds This result highlights the existence of robust cross-modal associations between certain sounds and basic tastes