Synaesthesia in Chinese characters: The role of radical function and position

Abstract

Grapheme-colour synaesthetes experience unusual colour percepts when they encounter letters and/or digits. Studies of English-speaking grapheme-colour synaesthetes have shown that synaesthetic colours are sometimes triggered by rulebased linguistic mechanisms (e.g., B might be blue). In contrast, little is known about synaesthesia in logographic languages such as Chinese. The current study shows the mechanisms by which synaesthetic speakers of Chinese colour their language. One hypothesis is that Chinese characters might be coloured by their constituent morphological units, known as radicals, and we tested this by eliciting synaesthetic colours for characters while manipulating features of the radicals within them. We found that both the function (semantic vs. phonetic) and position (left vs. right) of radicals influenced the nature of the synaesthetic colour generated. Our data show that in Chinese, as in English, synaesthetic colours are influenced by systematic rules, rather than by random associations, and that these rules are based on existing psycholinguistic mechanisms of language processing.

Cross-modal association between vowels and colours: A cross-linguistic perspective

“…Previous studies have shown that many of the coloured hearing synaesthetes were actually grapheme-colour synaesthetes (Baron-Cohen et al, 1993;. Although Chinese characters can also induce coloured sensation (Simner et al, 2011;Hung et al, 2014), the low graphemephoneme correspondence in Chinese characters can ensure that any mappings found in our study can be attributed to actual speech sounds instead of the writing system. Unlike in mainland China where all students learn the official pinyin system for Mandarin, Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong (i.e., participants in the current study) are not taught any Romanization methods for Cantonese at all.…”

“…A robust pitch effect is observed with a high tone eliciting lighter colours and a low tone eliciting darker colours in general. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first study on vowelcolour association involving Chinese (tone language) speakers (Simner et al, 2011;Hung et al, 2014 were on grapheme-colour association) and using pitch difference produced by the same voice. Our results confirm the universality of this cross-modal association by extending the findings to new languages.…”

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

“…As is generally the case for literature on grapheme-color synesthesia, the search for the determinants of synesthetic color has been pursued mostly by testing synesthetes whose first language is English. Only a handful of studies have been conducted on grapheme-color synesthetes who experience colors with nonEnglish languages such as German (Emrich et al, 2004), Hebrew (Cohen-Kadosh et al, 2007), Korean (Kim and Kim, 2009), and Chinese (Hung, 2013;Hung et al, 2013;Simner et al, 2011). There are also few studies of English-speaking grapheme-color synesthetes who also experience colors with characters of multiple different languages such as Irish Gaelic, French, German, Italian (Barnett et al, 2009), Greek (Rich et al, 2005), Russian (Mills et al, 2002;Witthoft and Winawer, 2006), and Chinese (Hung, 2013;Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2003).…”

Synaesthetic colour associations for Japanese Kanji characters: from the perspective of grapheme learning

“…the language has an opaque writing system, or many people learn non-native second languages in their childhood). However, it has not been investigated whether synaesthetic colours can be updated when new knowledge about graphemes is acquired; rather, it is usually emphasized that synaesthetes are highly consistent over time in their grapheme-colour associations [34,35]. As noted above, various features of graphemes can affect synesthetic grapheme-colour associations.…”