Japanese Word―Color Associations with and without Contexts

Although some words carry strong associations with specific colors (e.g., the word danger is associated with the color red), few studies have investigated these relationships. This may be due to the relative rarity of databases that contain large quantities of such information. Additionally, these resources are often limited to particular languages, such as English. Moreover, the existing resources often do not consider the possible contexts of words in assessing the associations between a word and a color. As a result, the influence of context on word–color associations is not fully understood. In this study, we constructed a novel language resource for word–color associations. The resource has two characteristics: First, our resource is the first to include Japanese word–color associations, which were collected via crowdsourcing. Second, the word–color associations in the resource are linked to contexts. We show that word–color associations depend on language and that associations with certain colors are affected by context information.