漢字色彩聯覺的語言因素探討

Abstract

字色聯覺指的是在觀看無色的文字或數字時，會產生額外的色彩知覺。多數對於字色聯覺的研究多著重在拼音文字的語言（例如：英文），並發現特定的語言因素會系統性地影響感受到的聯覺顏色（例如：B連結到藍色），但對於表義文字系統（例如：中文）是否也存在類似的關聯性，仍有待進一步的探討。本研究選用四組無色漢字來釐清四個語言因素（字形、字音、字義、及表義單位）和聯覺顏色之間的關聯。我們透過一致性測驗，篩選出具有漢字字色聯覺者的參與者進行實驗。分析這些聯覺者字與字之間的聯覺顏色相似性，結果發現字義關聯性高以及重複部件（部首或聲旁）這兩項因素，顯著地和聯覺者所感知的色彩相似性有關。同音字的色彩相似性僅在聲旁重複時顯著較高，且重複聲旁也僅在同音時色彩會顯著相似，顯示部件的表音功能，也在聯覺顏色的形成扮演重要的角色。連綿詞無論是否有語音相似性（重複聲母或韻母），皆傾向引發相似的聯覺顏色。先前研究顯示英文字色聯覺者會將單字的顏色與首字或首母音連結，而漢字的聯覺則沒有單一因素可以決定整字的顏色，顯示中文字色聯覺的現象，包含了不同層次的心理語言處理歷程。

Grapheme-color synesthetes perceive unusual color perception when seeing colorless letters or digits. Previous studies on grapheme-color synesthesia used mostly alphabetic writing system, and found specific rule-based linguistic factors related to the perceived synesthetic color. However, whether similar mechanisms exist in logographic languages such as Chinese remains mostly unknown. We manipulated four linguistic factors (orthographic, phonetic, semantic, and morphemic) of Chinese characters and examined how these factors influenced the color-mapping of Taiwanese grapheme-color synesthesia. Synesthetes with grapheme-color synesthesia of Chinese characters who passed the synesthesia consistency test performed a color-matching task using four sets of Chinese characters, which were used to clarify the role of different linguistic factors that could be related to the color mapping of the synesthetic color. We found that semantic relatedness and orthographic similarity (repeated semantic radicals and repeated phonetic radicals) played a significant role in synesthetic color similarity. Phonetic similarity was correlated with synesthetic color similarity only when two characters shared the same phonetic radical, and repetition of phonetic radical was also correlated with synesthetic color when the pronunciation was the same. This interaction effect suggested that the radical function of Chinese characters is involved in synesthetic color mapping. We also found that regardless of various similarity in their pronunciations, the character pairs from binding words that form a single morpheme had similar synesthetic color. While studies of English lexical synesthesia showed a rather clear correlation between the first letter/vowel and the synesthetic color of the word, we found in the current study that no single factor could exclusively determine synesthetic color mapping in Chinese. These findings indicate that the grapheme-color synesthesia of Chinese characters involves multiple levels of language processing.