Iconicity is a fundamental property of spoken and signed languages. However, quantitative analysis of sound-meaning association in Chinese has not been extensively developed, and little is known about the impact of sound symbolism in children’s literature. As sound symbolism is supposed to be a universal cognitive phenomenon, this research seeks to investigate whether iconic structures of Mandarin are embodied in native Chinese speakers’ language experience. The paper describes a case study of Chinese storybooks with the goal of testing whether phonosemantic (...) association is prominent between name sounds and character features. A quantitative method was used to investigate the distribution of different phonological units in character denomination depending on their physical and emotional traits. The results show that phonemes and syllable combination patterns are closely related to perceivable character features. By comparing schematic mapping in Chinese with other languages, the study illuminates a cross-linguistic tendency in addition to a Chinese-specific iconic relation between sound and meaning. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of perception, it is commonly claimed that flavour experiences are paradigmatic examples of multimodal perceptual experiences. In fact, virtually any sensory system, including vision and audition, is believed to influence how we experience flavours. However, there is a strong intuition, often expressed in these works, that not all of these sensory systems make an equal contribution to the phenomenology of flavour experiences. More specifically, it seems that the activities of some sensory systems are constitutive for flavour perception (...) while others merely influence how we experience flavours. This paper aims to answer the question regarding the constitutive factors of flavour perception in a twofold way. First, a theoretical framework is developed, relying on debates regarding constitutivity in analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science, which defines the stronger and weaker senses in which the activities of sensory systems may be constitutive for flavour perception. Second, relying on empirical results in flavour science, the constitutive status of activities related to distinct sensory systems in the context of flavour perception is investigated. (shrink)

Colour is an important guideline for selection and consumption. It also draws attention to the designers, as some modern design styles require them to illustrate the taste of the product with a limited number of colours. In this case, a precise description of the taste-colour association is required. The present study explored the colour-taste crossmodal association of two tastes, crisp and dry, which are normally found in beers and are the preferred flavours of Chinese consumers. Experiments were carried out to (...) determine the characteristics of the colours associated with the two tastes. And the strength of the tastes perceived from the colours with different hue angles was investigated. The results of this study reveal that the hue and chroma can both affect the perception of these tastes. Both tastes can be perceived from the same colour, but the strength of the taste can be varied from different hues. (shrink)

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Taste metaphors provide a rich vocabulary for describing emotional experience, potentially serving as an adaptive mechanism for conveying abstract emotional concepts using concrete verbal references to our shared experience. We theorized that the popularity of these expressions results from the close association with hedonic valence shared by these two domains of experience. To explore the possibility that this affective quality underlies the semantic similarity of these domains, we used a behavioral “odd-one-out” task in an online (...) sample of 1059 participants in order to examine the semantic similarity of concepts related to emotion, taste, and color, another rich source of sensory metaphors. We found that the semantic similarity of emotion and taste concepts was greater than that of emotion and color concepts. Importantly, the similarity of taste and emotion concepts was strongly related to their similarity in hedonic valence, a relationship which was also significantly greater than that present between color and emotion. These results suggest that the common core of valence between taste and emotion concepts allows us to bridge the conceptual divide between our shared sensory environment and our internal emotional experience. (shrink)

Is blue food desirable or disgusting? The answer, it would seem, is both, but it really depends on the food in which the color happens to be present. It turns out that the oft-cited aversive response to blue meat may not even have been scientifically validated, despite the fact that blue food coloring is often added to discombobulate diners. In the case of drinks, however, there has been a recent growth of successful new blue product launches in everything from beer (...) to tea, and from wine to gin, arguing that coloring food products blue is more than simply a contemporary fad. In fact, the current interest in blue food coloring builds on the color's earlier appearance in everything from blue curacao to blue-raspberry candyfloss (cotton candy), and thereafter a number of soft drinks. Over the years, the combination of blue coloring with raspberry flavoring has also appeared in everything from bubble-gum to patriotic pop rocks (popping candy in The United States). Ultimately, it is the rarity of naturally-blue foods that is likely what makes this color so special. As such, blue food coloring can both work effectively to attract the visual attention of the shopper while, at the same time, being linked to a range of different flavors (since this is one of the few color-flavor mappings that are essentially arbitrary) depending on the food format in which it happens to appear. Note also that the basic descriptor “blue” covers a wide range of hues having a range of different associations, hence eliciting different reactions (be they positive or negative). While blue was once associated with artificiality, a growing number of natural blue food colorings have come onto the market in recent years thus perhaps changing the dominant associations that many consumers may have with this most unusual of food colors. (shrink)

Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, sound symbolism, or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specificity of these mappings. This study investigated whether sound symbolic properties correspond to specific meanings, or whether these properties generalize across semantic dimensions. In three experiments, native English-speaking adults heard sound symbolic foreign words for (...) dimensional adjective pairs and for each foreign word, selected a translation among English antonyms that either matched or mismatched with the correct meaning dimension. Listeners agreed more reliably on the English translation for matched relative to mismatched dimensions, though reliable cross-dimensional mappings did occur. These findings suggest that although sound symbolic properties generalize to meanings that may share overlapping semantic features, sound symbolic mappings offer semantic specificity. (shrink)