Both “나” and “な” are yellow: Cross-linguistic investigation in search of the determinants of synesthetic color

Graphemes Sharing Phonetic Features Tend to Induce Similar Synesthetic Colors

“…This was the case not just within a script, but also across multiple scripts of different languages. It is one step further from the previous findings (Asano and Yokosawa, 2011, 2012; Shin and Kim, 2014) toward verifying the importance of sound as a determining factor of synesthetic color. Moreover, our results showed that graphemes of the same phonetic category tend to be associated with similar synesthetic colors, even though they are not transliterable into each other.…”

“…In a previous work of our group, sound was identified as the most prominent determining factor of synesthetic color (Shin and Kim, 2014). The current work further extended the previous finding by considering articulatory rules as means to examine the acoustic, phonetic influence on synesthetic colors.…”

“…Based on the previous work showing the similarity of synesthetic colors of graphemes and syllabaries sharing initial phonemes (Shin and Kim, 2014), we only included graphemes for hangul and Latin scripts, not syllabaries the sounds of which match those of Japanese syllabaries. Each stimulus was presented in black Arial font on the screen.…”

“…The experimental procedures followed those in the work by Shin and Kim (2014). A modified version of the standardized Synesthesia Battery was used for a synesthetic color-matching test (Eagleman et al, 2007; Carmichael et al, 2015).…”

“…Some previous works have taken cross-linguistic approaches to consider the possibility that inherent differences between languages affect synesthetic grapheme-color association (Rouw et al, 2014; Shin and Kim, 2014). For example, Shin and Kim tested four Korean multilingual synesthetes who can read, write, and speak Korean, English, and Japanese and also experience synesthetic colors from scripts of those three languages.…”