Goodhew Stephanie C, Kidd Evan
Research School of Psychology, The Australian National University, Australia; ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australia.
Research School of Psychology, The Australian National University, Australia; ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australia.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2017 Feb;173:73-86. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2016.12.008. Epub 2016 Dec 24.
Synaesthesia is the neuropsychological phenomenon in which individuals experience unusual sensory associations, such as experiencing particular colours in response to particular words. While it was once thought the particular pairings between stimuli were arbitrary and idiosyncratic to particular synaesthetes, there is now growing evidence for a systematic psycholinguistic basis to the associations. Here we sought to assess the explanatory value of quantifiable lexical association measures (via latent semantic analysis; LSA) in the pairings observed between words and colours in synaesthesia. To test this, we had synaesthetes report the particular colours they experienced in response to given concept words, and found that language association between the concept and colour words provided highly reliable predictors of the reported pairings. These results provide convergent evidence for a psycholinguistic basis to synaesthesia, but in a novel way, showing that exposure to particular patterns of associations in language can predict the formation of particular synaesthetic lexical-colour associations. Consistent with previous research, the prototypical synaesthetic colour for the first letter of the word also played a role in shaping the colour for the whole word, and this effect also interacted with language association, such that the effect of the colour for the first letter was stronger as the association between the concept word and the colour word in language increased. Moreover, when a group of non-synaesthetes were asked what colours they associated with the concept words, they produced very similar reports to the synaesthetes that were predicted by both language association and prototypical synaesthetic colour for the first letter of the word. This points to a shared linguistic experience generating the associations for both groups.
联觉是一种神经心理学现象，即个体体验到不寻常的感官关联，比如看到特定的单词会联想到特定的颜色。虽然曾经人们认为刺激之间的特定配对是任意的，且是特定联觉者所特有的，但现在越来越多的证据表明，这些关联存在系统的心理语言学基础。在此，我们试图评估可量化的词汇联想度量（通过潜在语义分析；LSA）在联觉中单词与颜色配对方面的解释价值。为了验证这一点，我们让联觉者报告他们看到给定概念词时所体验到的特定颜色，结果发现概念词与颜色词之间的语言联想能够高度可靠地预测所报告的配对。这些结果为联觉的心理语言学基础提供了趋同证据，但以一种新颖的方式表明，接触语言中特定的联想模式能够预测特定的联觉词汇 - 颜色联想的形成。与先前的研究一致，单词首字母的典型联觉颜色在塑造整个单词的颜色方面也发挥了作用，并且这种效应还与语言联想相互作用，即随着概念词与颜色词在语言中的联想增强，首字母颜色的效应会更强。此外，当一组非联觉者被问及他们将哪些颜色与概念词联系起来时，他们给出的报告与联觉者非常相似，而这些报告是由语言联想和单词首字母的典型联觉颜色所预测的。这表明两组人产生这些联想的语言体验是相同的。
