Nonrandom Associations of Graphemes with Colors in Arabic

Abstract

Numerous studies demonstrate people associate colors with letters and numbers in systematic ways. But most of these studies rely on speakers of English, or closely related languages. This makes it difficult to know how generalizable these findings are, or what factors might underlie these associations. We investigated letter–color and number–color associations in Arabic speakers, who have a different writing system and unusual word structure compared to Standard Average European languages. We also aimed to identify grapheme–color synaesthetes (people who have conscious color experiences with letters and numbers). Participants associated colors with 28 basic Arabic letters and ten digits by typing color names that best fit each grapheme. We found language-specific principles determining grapheme–color associations. For example, the word formation process in Arabic was relevant for color associations. In addition, psycholinguistic variables, such as letter frequency and the intrinsic order of graphemes influenced associations. Contrary to previous studies we found no evidence for sounds playing a role in letter–color associations for Arabic, and only a very limited role for shape influencing color associations. These findings highlight the importance of linguistic and psycholinguistic features in cross-modal correspondences, and illustrate why it is important to play close attention to each language on its own terms in order to disentangle language-specific from universal effects.

Cross-modal associations and synesthesia: Categorical perception and structure in vowel–color mappings in a large online sample

“…Synesthetes tend to associate similar colors to similarly shaped graphemes (Brang, Rouw, Ramachandran, & Coulson, 2011; Eagleman, 2010; Jürgens, Mausfeld, & Nikolic, 2010; Watson, Akins, & Enns, 2012), implying an important role for visual grapheme shape in mediating the associations. However, other factors, such as ordinality in the alphabet and frequency in language, also play a role (e.g., van Leeuwen, Dingemanse, Todil, Agameya, & Majid, 2016; Watson et al, 2012).…”

“…Just as lexicalization patterns in the domain of color can shape low-level processes of color perception (Roberson, Pak, & Hanley, 2008), so phonemic structure may shape cross-modal associations. This is one place where linguistic diversity in phonetics, phonology, and orthography can be used to learn more about the mechanisms underlying vowel–color associations and to tease apart the roles of acoustic, phonemic, and graphemic features in cross-modal associations (Root et al, 2018; van Leeuwen et al, 2016).…”

Body and the Senses in Spatial Experience: The Implications of Kinesthetic and Synesthetic Perceptions for Design Thinking

“…Synesthesia is a physio-psychological and cross-modal sensory phenomenon that is autonomous, involuntary, and irrepressible; it occurs when a stimulus in one sense modality immediately evokes sensations in one or more different sense modalities ( Hubbard and Ramachandran, 2005 ; Van Campen, 2008 ; Merter, 2017 ). Synesthetes may see sounds, smell words, touch tastes, or taste letters, for example ( van Leeuwen et al, 2016 ). When grapheme–color synesthetes see a number or a letter, they see a color at the same time ( Figure 4 ), which is different from just imagining the color or making an association based upon memory ( Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2003 ).…”

Distinct colours in the ‘synaesthetic colour palette’

“…'D is for dog'), has a prototypical colour association (dogs are brown), this can influence the colour of that letter (D is brown). Furthermore, the first letter of the synaesthete's language is associated with red in many of the world's languages, for both synaesthetes and nonsynaesthetes ( [23,25], but see [26]). Finally, the phonetic properties of letters influence colour associations in both synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]; for example, 'lower' or 'back' acoustic vowel characteristics (e.g.…”