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.

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Past research has investigated how children use different sources of information such as social cues and word-learning heuristics to infer referential intents. The present research explored how children weigh and use some of these cues to make referential inferences. Specifically, we examined how switching between languages known (familiar) or unknown (unfamiliar) to a child would influence his or her choice of cue to interpret a novel label in a challenging disambiguation task, where a pointing cue was pitted against the mutual exclusivity (ME) principle. Forty-eight 3-and 4-years-old English–Mandarin bilingual children listened to a story told either in English only (No-Switch), English and Mandarin (Familiar-Switch), English and Japanese (Unfamiliar-Switch), or English and English-sounding nonsense sentences (Nonsense-Switch). They were then asked to select an object (from a pair of familiar and novel objects) after hearing a novel label paired with the speaker’s point at the familiar object, e.g., “Can you give me the blicket?” Results showed that children in the Familiar-Switch condition were more willing to relax ME to follow the speaker’s point to pick the familiar object than those in the Unfamiliar-Switch condition, who were more likely to pick the novel object. No significant differences were found between the other conditions. Further analyses revealed that children in the Unfamiliar-Switch condition looked at the speaker longer than children in the other conditions when the switch happened. Our findings suggest that children weigh speakers’ referential cues and word-learning heuristics differently in different language contexts while taking into account their communicative history with the speaker. There are important implications for general education and other learning efforts, such as designing learning games so that the history of credibility with the user is maintained and how learning may be best scaffolded in a helpful and trusting environment.

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