ArticleCognition2015
What is the link between synaesthesia and sound symbolism?
Article in Cognition, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Sources of Intelligibility of Distant Languages: An Empirical Study.Language and speech · 2026Article
- Sound symbolism facilitates interspecies communication between humans and domestic dogs (Canis familiaris).Scientific reports · 2025Article
- How (and why) languages became more complex as we evolved more prosocial: the human self-domestication view.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Sound-meaning associations allow listeners to infer the meaning of foreign language words.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- Language evolution: examining the link between cross-modality and aggression through the lens of disorders.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Iconicity in Word Learning and Beyond: A Critical Review.Language and speech · 2021Review
- English Speakers Can Infer Pokémon Types Based on Sound Symbolism.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Implicit associations between individual properties of color and sound.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2019Article
- Guessing Meaning From Word Sounds of Unfamiliar Languages: A Cross-Cultural Sound Symbolism Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2018Review
- The audiovisual structure of onomatopoeias: An intrusion of real-world physics in lexical creation.PloS one · 2018Article
- Glyph guessing for 'oo' and 'ee': spatial frequency information in sound symbolic matching for ancient and unfamiliar scripts.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Semantic Specificity in One-Year-Olds' Word Comprehension.Language learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development · 2017Article
- Synesthesia strengthens sound-symbolic cross-modal correspondences.The European journal of neuroscience · 2016Article
- Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Iconicity in the lab: a review of behavioral, developmental, and neuroimaging research into sound-symbolism.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.