The effects of phonological and semantic information on color perception in grapheme-color synesthesia J Lee, K Sakata |
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College of Art and Design, Joshibi University of Art and Design, Japan
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| The experience of synesthetic color is the same even if input stimuli are different. Similar synesthetic colors can be elicited by similar features of characters, such as morphological forms and phonological information in grapheme-color synesthesia [Asano & Yokosawa, 2011, Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1816–1823; Witthoft & Winawer, 2006, Cortex, 42(2), 175–183], and by word meanings in word-color synesthesia [Callejas et al., 2007, Brain research, 1127(1), 99-107; Ward, 2004, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21(7), 761-772]. Previous studies have mostly examined synesthetic colors elicited by morphological forms and phonological information because each phonographic character does not contain a meaning. We investigated whether graphemes in an ideogram could be affected by meaning and thereby elicit synesthetic color. In Experiment 1, phonological information in the ideogram induced synesthetic colors similar to those induced by a phonogram. In Experiment 2, an ideographic character was strongly influenced by the relationship between phonemic and semantic information. The results reveal that (1) synesthetic colors elicited by an ideogram were equivalent to the meaning of the stimuli, even though they had the same phonological information, and (2) each ideographic character of the color name evoked the same synesthetic color as the color name. Thus, we conclude that grapheme-color synesthesia is a phenomenon in which multiple perceptual and cognitive factors are involved. These results show that the causes of synesthetic colors in grapheme-color synesthesia are strongly influenced by the letter types. |
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