SYNESTHETIC ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN EARLY ACQUIRED CONCEPTS

Abstract

The seemingly unexplainable associations between such early acquired semantic categories as colors, days of the week, months, shapes, and digits are an underresearched topic in the research on synesthesia. This work fills this gap in knowledge and delves into the possible reasons for particular pairings to be created. Previous research claims that similar types of synesthesia come from such things as childhood experiences, frequency of word use, and time of acquisition. To research this topic, the work looked into the existing reports of such synesthetic experiences; collected new reports in English, Russian, and Kazakh; and conducted two experiments: to check whether synesthete participants have stable association pairs, and whether the frequency of the words could predict their likelihood to be picked as a pair. The results of the work show that the creation of the association pair could depend on all of the previously mentioned factors. The dependency seems to be hierarchical, meaning that some factors take precedence in determining the pairing. This way, the associations that appear out of constant life experiences seem to not be affected by other factors, however, they only cover a small portion of existing association pairs. The frequency with which the words are used – and arguably their prototypicality – are what determines a large part of the association pairs and to a statistically significant extent. The work also finds that the association pairs are transferable from L1 to L2 and that there are particular trends to what items get paired up the most. Such frequent pairings are constant across participants and languages. While this work does base its findings on bilingual speakers of Kazakh and Russian, a comparison to a English corpus of pre-existing reports of association pairs shows stability of the general trends.