"sounds like a Rainbow" - Sound-colour Mappings in Vowel Perception
نویسندگان
چکیده
The paper reports on an experiment conducted to investigate the nature of speech sound perception in terms of cross-modal mappings between vowel sound stimuli and colour spectrum associations. The study is based on the assumptions stemming from research on synaesthesia, sound symbolism and non-modularity of human perception. The findings indicate that vowel-sound mappings appear non-arbitrary in non-synaesthetic perception and follow the general tendencies in which bright colours are associated with prominent high-pitched sounds, whereas dark colours are attributed to lower-pitched tones. The results may have implications for L2 pronunciation pedagogy in that they may enhance the effectiveness of L2 phonological acquisition.
منابع مشابه
"Still sounds like a rainbow" - a proposal for a coloured vowel chart
The present contribution aims at reinvestigating the idea of sound-colour charts with a view to enhancing L2 pronunciation training through relying on sound and colour perceptual correspondence. A preliminary proposal for a coloured vowel chart is put forward, in which the assignment of colours corresponds to the general tendencies resulting from cross-modal studies on vowel and colour associat...
متن کاملCross-modal associations in synaesthesia: Vowel colours in the ear of the beholder
Human speech conveys many forms of information, but for some exceptional individuals (synaesthetes), listening to speech sounds can automatically induce visual percepts such as colours. In this experiment, grapheme-colour synaesthetes and controls were asked to assign colours, or shades of grey, to different vowel sounds. We then investigated whether the acoustic content of these vowel sounds i...
متن کاملDo colourless green voices speak furiously? Linkages between phonetic and visual perception in synaesthesia
Synaesthesia is an unusual phenomenon, in which additional sensory perceptions are triggered by apparently unrelated sensory or conceptual stimuli. The main foci of this presentation lie in vowel sound colour and voice-induced synaesthesia. While grapheme-colour synaesthesia has been intensively researched using various methodologies (neurological studies, extensive interviews, and behavioural ...
متن کاملCross-modal association between colour, vowel and lexical tone in nonsynesthetic populations: Cantonese, Mandarin and English
Previous studies suggested that the synesthesia-like coloured hearing could be found in nonsynesthetic population for both vowel quality and pitch. The vowel-colour and pitch-colour associations were investigated separately so it is unclear whether vowel quality or pitch has a stronger effect on crossmodal colour association, and how they may interact. No study has investigated this phenomenon ...
متن کاملEmergence of Speech Sounds in Changing Populations
This paper shows that realistic and coherent vowel syst ems can emerge from scratch in a population of agents that imit ate ach other under human-like constraints of production and perception. The simulat ion is extended so that populations can change; old agents can be removed, a nd new agents can be added. In these circumstances vowel systems can also em erge and be preserved. It is hown that...
متن کامل