On Hearing Colours — Cross-Modal Associations in Vowel Perception in a Non-Synaesthetic Population

Abstract

The present study is a continuation of previous investigations into the nature of sound−colour associations in a non-synaesthetic population conducted on English and Polish vowel sound systems and it aims at providing further evidence for the non-arbitrary nature of cross-modal mappings. The experiment 1 was run on a specially designed computer program and involved 90 participants who were asked to match randomised auditory stimuli (12 English vowel sounds recorded in 2 conditions: in isolation and in a CVC context) with one of 11 basic colours (red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, black, white and grey) presented as coloured rectangles on a computer screen. The program kept record of the colour choice and reaction time of the participants, who fell into 2 groups with respect to the level of their language proficiency and phonetic awareness.An analysis of the results revealed statistically significant interactions between specific colours and individual vowel sounds for all 12 English vowels examined in the combined analysis; for 10 vowels in Condition 1 (isolated auditory stimuli) and for 7 vowels in Condition 2 (stimuli in the CVC context). A group effect was not found to be significant as far as the quality of mappings was concerned; however, in the case of reaction times the less advanced learners took significantly longer to assign colours to sounds in context. The findings indicate that vowel−sound mappings in non-synaesthetic perception appear non-arbitrary and follow the general tendencies in which bright colours (yellow, green) are associated with high front vowel sounds, whereas dark colours (brown, blue, black) are attributed to back vowels, while open sounds tend to be perceived as red and central vowels are mapped onto achromatic grey.

A Psychological Experiment on the Correspondence between Colors and Voiced Vowels in Non-synesthetes'

“…Almost the same pattern of correspondence was found in our previous study [12], so that we conclude that the pattern of correspondence between colors and vowels in Japanese non-synesthetes is stable. The results in this study also showed resemblance to the Polish results of Wrembel [13], suggesting that certain aspects of the correspondence between colors and vowels are universal. In experiment 1 some additional effects of gender and the pitch of voices were also shown.…”

“…Yet the correspondence between red and /a/ is not limited to Japanese [16]. These patterns of correspondence including the case of red and /a/ were found across languages and types of synesthesia [9,13,16]. So beyond language specific label effects, there must reside some common factors.…”

Sound Symbolism in Foreign Language Phonological Acquisition

“…The results of the present study are also very much in line with a series of experiments on multimodal sound-colour correspondence in L1 and L2 in a nonsynaesthetic population (Wrembel 2007(Wrembel , 2009Wrembel & Rataj 2008). The vowelcolour interactions generated in these studies demonstrated non-arbitrary patterns of distribution, in which specific phonemic features triggered particular colour attributes, namely front vowels were associated with bright colours; back vowels with darker hues; open vowels generally with red; and central vowels with achromatic grey.…”

“…In the present section the findings are first interpreted and then compared against other studies on sound symbolism and synaesthesia as well as a series of experiments on sound-colour coding conducted by the present author (Wrembel 2007, Wrembel & Rataj 2008, Wrembel 2009.…”

“…Then the findings will be interpreted against some recent sound symbolic studies (e.g. Hinton et al 2006) and, in particular, they will be discussed in the light of previous experiments on sound-colour coding conducted by the present author (Wrembel 2007, Wrembel & Rataj 2008, Wrembel 2009). …”