Person:
Melero Carrasco, Helena

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First Name
Helena
Last Name
Melero Carrasco
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/80242
Affiliation
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Faculty / Institute
Psicología
Department
Psicobiología y Metodología en Ciencias del Comportamiento
Area
Psicobiología
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2018 - 201912020 - 20211
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Author: Asano, Michiko × Has files: true ×

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    Why is the synesthete's “A” red? Using a five-language dataset to disentangle the effects of shape, sound, semantics, and ordinality on inducer–concurrent relationships in grapheme-color synesthesia
    (Cortex, 2018) Root, Nicholas B.; Rouw, Romke; Asano, Michiko; Chai-Youn Kim; Yokosawa, Kazuhiko; Ramachandran, Vilayanur S.; Melero Carrasco, Helena
    Grapheme-color synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which viewing a grapheme elicits an additional, automatic, and consistent sensation of color. Color-to-letter associations in synesthesia are interesting in their own right, but also offer an opportunity to examine relationships between visual, acoustic, and semantic aspects of language. Research using large populations of synesthetes has indeed found that grapheme-color pairings can be influenced by numerous properties of graphemes, but the contributions made by each of these explanatory factors are often confounded in a monolingual dataset (i.e., only English-speaking synesthetes). Here, we report the first demonstration of how a multilingual dataset can reveal potentially-universal influences on synesthetic associations, and disentangle previously-confounded hypotheses about the relationship between properties of synesthetic color and properties of the grapheme that induces it. Numerous studies have reported that for English-speaking synesthetes, “A” tends to be colored red more often than predicted by chance, and several explanatory factors have been proposed that could explain this association. Using a five-language dataset (native English, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean speakers), we compare the predictions made by each explanatory factor, and show that only an ordinal explanation makes consistent predictions across all five languages, suggesting that the English “A” is red because the first grapheme of a synesthete's alphabet or syllabary tends to be associated with red. We propose that the relationship between the first grapheme and the color red is an association between an unusually-distinct ordinal position (“first”) and an unusually-distinct color (red). We test the predictions made by this theory, and demonstrate that the first grapheme is unusually distinct (has a color that is distant in color space from the other letters' colors). Our results demonstrate the importance of considering cross-linguistic similarities and differences in synesthesia, and suggest that some influences on grapheme-color associations in synesthesia might be universal.
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    Do the colors of your letters depend on your language? Language-dependent and universal influences on grapheme-color synesthesia in seven languages
    (Consciousness and Cognition, 2021) Root, Nicholas; Asano, Michiko; Melero Carrasco, Helena; Kim, Chai-Youn; Sidoroff-Dorso, Anton V.; Vatakis, Argiro; Yokosawa, Kazuhiko; Ramachandrann, Vilayanur; Rouw, Romke
    Grapheme-color synesthetes experience graphemes as having a consistent color (e.g., “N is turquoise”). Synesthetes’ specific associations (which letter is which color) are often influenced by linguistic properties such as phonetic similarity, color terms (“Y is yellow”), and semantic associations (“D is for dog and dogs are brown”). However, most studies of synesthesia use only English-speaking synesthetes. Here, we measure the effect of color terms, semantic associations, and non-linguistic shape-color associations on synesthetic associations in Dutch, English, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. The effect size of linguistic influences (color terms, semantic associations) differed significantly between languages. In contrast, the effect size of nonlinguistic influences (shape-color associations), which we predicted to be universal, indeed did not differ between languages. We conclude that language matters (outcomes are influenced by the synesthete’s language) and that synesthesia offers an exceptional opportunity to study influences on letter representations in different languages.