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 rule-based linguistic mechanisms . 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 and position of radicals influence 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. (shrink)

This study seeks to clarify the nature of linguistic synesthesia using a lexical-conceptual account. Based on a lexical analysis of Mandarin synesthetic usages, we find that linguistic synesthesia maps the metaphorical meaning between two domains; and linguistic synesthetic mappings and conceptual metaphoric mappings have similar behaviors when sense modalities are treated as conceptual domains that contain a set of mappings constrained by Mapping Principles. This lexical-conceptual account is designed to capture the fact that linguistic synesthesia involves mapping between lexicalized concepts (...) of sensory properties, instead of the real-time sensory input that is processed in neurological synesthesia. The incorporation of a lexical semantic view with the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory not only offers a coherent and comprehensive account for the nature of linguistic synesthesia, but also handles aspects of linguistic synesthesia previously only accounted for by non-metaphorical accounts. These design features make this proposal the most comprehensive account to fit the current data. Furthermore, by showing linguistic synesthesia as a type of metaphor, our study strengthens the role of conceptual metaphors as the link between the perceived world and our conceptualization of that world. (shrink)