Bankieris Kaitlyn, Simner Julia
University of Rochester, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 358 Meliora Hall, Rochester, NY 14627, United States.
University of Sussex, School of Psychology, Pevensey Building, Falmer BN19QH, UK; University of Edinburgh, Department of Psychology, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH89YL, UK.
Cognition. 2015 Mar;136:186-95. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.11.013. Epub 2014 Dec 10.
Sound symbolism is a property of certain words which have a direct link between their phonological form and their semantic meaning. In certain instances, sound symbolism can allow non-native speakers to understand the meanings of etymologically unfamiliar foreign words, although the mechanisms driving this are not well understood. We examined whether sound symbolism might be mediated by the same types of cross-modal processes that typify synaesthetic experiences. Synaesthesia is an inherited condition in which sensory or cognitive stimuli (e.g., sounds, words) cause additional, unusual cross-modal percepts (e.g., sounds trigger colours, words trigger tastes). Synaesthesia may be an exaggeration of normal cross-modal processing, and if so, there may be a link between synaesthesia and the type of cross-modality inherent in sound symbolism. To test this we predicted that synaesthetes would have superior understanding of unfamiliar (sound symbolic) foreign words. In our study, 19 grapheme-colour synaesthetes and 57 non-synaesthete controls were presented with 400 adjectives from 10 unfamiliar languages and were asked to guess the meaning of each word in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Both groups showed superior understanding compared to chance levels, but synaesthetes significantly outperformed controls. This heightened ability suggests that sound symbolism may rely on the types of cross-modal integration that drive synaesthetes' unusual experiences. It also suggests that synaesthesia endows or co-occurs with heightened multi-modal skills, and that this can arise in domains unrelated to the specific form of synaesthesia.
语音象征是某些单词的一种特性，这些单词的语音形式与其语义之间存在直接联系。在某些情况下，语音象征可以让非母语者理解词源上不熟悉的外来词的含义，尽管其背后的机制尚未完全明了。我们研究了语音象征是否可能由构成通感体验典型特征的相同类型的跨模态过程介导。通感是一种遗传状况，其中感觉或认知刺激（如声音、单词）会引发额外的、不寻常的跨模态感知（如声音引发颜色、单词引发味道）。通感可能是正常跨模态处理的一种夸张表现，如果是这样，那么通感与语音象征中固有的跨模态类型之间可能存在联系。为了验证这一点，我们预测通感者对不熟悉的（语音象征的）外来词会有更好的理解。在我们的研究中，向19名 grapheme - colour 通感者和57名非通感者对照组呈现了来自10种不熟悉语言的400个形容词，并要求他们在二选一的强制选择任务中猜测每个单词的含义。与随机水平相比，两组都表现出了更好的理解，但通感者的表现明显优于对照组。这种增强的能力表明，语音象征可能依赖于驱动通感者异常体验的跨模态整合类型。这也表明通感赋予或伴随有增强的多模态技能，并且这种情况可能出现在与通感的特定形式无关的领域。
