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Three experiments tested the proposal that music-color associations are mediated by emotional connotations as suggested by Palmer and collaborators (2013, 2016). Experiment 1 asked participants to choose 1 of 8 saturated colors for excerpts of 24 Preludes from Bach's Well-tempered Clavier. Half of these excerpts were presented again for color choices, together with excerpts from another 12 Preludes. Participants were also asked to judge whether or not they had heard the excerpts before in the experiment. The color choices grouped together Preludes according to tempo, mode, pitch height, and attack rate. Participants included nonmusicians, musicians, absolute pitch (AP) possessors, and music-color synesthetes. Color choices followed the same general pattern across groups, and were more similar than chance when the excerpts were repeated and, to a lesser extent, when the excerpt was different but in the same key. No recognition advantage was found for synesthetes or possessors of AP. Experiment 2 asked participants to rate the colors on a number of emotion scales. Experiment 3 asked them to rate the excerpts from the Preludes on the same emotion scales, and found that the emotion ratings grouped together Preludes according to tempo, mode, pitch height, and attack rate as in Experiment 1. Finally, the color choices in Experiment 1 could be predicted by the color-emotion ratings in Experiment 2 and the music-emotion ratings in Experiment 3. These results support the proposal that music-color associations can be accounted for by the correlations between music and emotion, and color and emotion.

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In the fields of linguistics and cognitive science, considerable attention has been devoted to the question of how linguistic structure emerged over evolutionary time. Here, we highlight the contribution of a fundamental constraint on processing, the Now-or-Never bottleneck. Language takes place in the here and now, with the transience of acoustic speech signals and our exceedingly limited memory for sound sequences requiring immediate processing. To overcome this bottleneck, the cognitive system employs basic chunking mechanisms to rapidly compress and recode incoming linguistic input into increasingly abstract levels of representation, thereby prolonging its retention in memory. Our suggestion is that these chunk-based memory processes influence linguistic structure across multiple time scales. Chunk-based memory constraints govern language acquisition and processing on the level of the individual. Through usage, linguistic structures that are more easily chunked will tend to proliferate, thus shaping the cultural evolution of language across generations of language users. This results in a selection of learnable structures, from individual words to multiword sequences that are optimally "chunkable," so as to better squeeze through the Now-or-Never bottleneck. From this perspective, language can be thought of as an adaptive system that culturally evolves to fit learners' cognitive capabilities, thereby resulting in the structure it bears today.