Irune's study, carried out with colleagues at the University of Oxford and the University of Barcelona, investigated the influence of language codes in the spatial representation of auditory pitch and loudness. The results show that, compared to Spanish and Catalan speakers, English speaker exhibit a greater degree of interaction between a sound's pitch and the spatial positioning of response buttons used to categorize that pitch as high or low. These findings provide new evidence of the overlap interplay between the spatial representations associated with language and pitch processing.

Reference:
Fernandez-Prieto, I., Spence, C., Pons, F., & Navarra, J. (2017). Does Language Influence the Vertical Representation of Auditory Pitch and Loudness. I-Perception, 8(3), 1-11, doi: 10.1177/2041669517716183.