Cross-modal association between colour, vowel and lexical tone in nonsynesthetic populations: Cantonese, Mandarin and English

Peggy MOK, Yanjun YIN, Lan CHEN, Him CHEUNG

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapters

Abstract

Previous studies suggested that the synesthesia-like coloured hearing could be found in nonsynesthetic population for both vowel quality and pitch. The vowel-colour and pitch-colour associations were investigated separately so it is unclear whether vowel quality or pitch has a stronger effect on cross-modal colour association, and how they may interact. No study has investigated this phenomenon in a tone language in which pitch differences are intrinsically coded with vowel qualities. The current study aims to examine whether there is non-random sound-colour mappings for Cantonese vowels in native and non-native (Mandarin and English) listeners. The results suggested that non-synesthetic subjects showed non-arbitrary vowel-colour associations of Cantonese vowels and pitch played a more fundamental role than vowel quality in coloured-hearing. Copyright © 2015 the author.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
Place of PublicationGlasgow
PublisherThe University of Glasgow
ISBN (Print)9780852619414
Publication statusPublished - 2015

Citation

Mok, P., Yin, Y., Chen, L., & Cheung, H. (2015). Cross-modal association between colour, vowel and lexical tone in nonsynesthetic populations: Cantonese, Mandarin and English. In Proceedings of 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Retrieved from https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2015/proceedings.html

Keywords

  • Cross-model perception
  • Colour
  • Tone
  • Vowel
  • Cantonese

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