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

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 22:43 authored by Wan-Yu Hung, Julia SimnerJulia Simner, Richard Shillcock, David M Eagleman
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 rule-based 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 influence 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.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Consciousness and Cognition

ISSN

1053-8100

Publisher

Elsevier

Issue

1

Volume

24

Page range

38-48

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Synaesthesia Research Group Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-01-25

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-01-25

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-01-25

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