“Sounds like a rainbow” - sound-colour mappings in vowel perception
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2008/02/0060/000119Keywords:
sound-colour mappings, vowel colour, synaesthesiaAbstract
The paper reports on an experiment conducted to investigate the nature of speech sound perception in terms of cross-modal mappings between vowel sound stimuli and colour spectrum associations. The study is based on the assumptions stemming from research on synaesthesia, sound symbolism, and the non-modularity of human perception. The findings indicate that vowel-sound mappings appear non-arbitrary in non-synaesthetic perception and follow general tendencies in which bright colours are associated with prominent high-pitched sounds, whereas dark colours are attributed to lower-pitched tones. The results may have implications for L2 pronunciation pedagogy in that they may enhance the effectiveness of L2 phonological acquisition.
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Copyright (c) 2008 Magdalena Wrembel (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
