“Those associations are far from arbitrary,” said Dingemanse on the telephone. They found the ‘aa’ sound to be more red than green and the ‘ie’ was light rather than dark. Surprisingly enough, more than 70 percent of the participants had a similar association pattern. And the colours that they chose were grouped around sounds that resembled a Dutch vowel (for example, ‘ie’). Both chose lighter colours for ‘ie’ (upper left) than for ‘oe’ (right) or ‘aa’ (below). Vowel-colour associations of two test subjects. They had to indicate which colour they thought best matched each sound. In the experiment, which was published this week in the journal Behavior Research Methods, more than 3000 test subjects listened to 16 different vowel sounds (like ‘oe’, ‘i’, and ‘aa’). The study was part of the so-called ‘Major National Study’ of synesthesia that Mark Dingemanse and Tessa van Leeuwen – language and brain researchers at the Max Planck and Donders Institutes – designed with the help of the NWO (The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). Linguists and brain scientists at a number of institutes, including the Max Planck Institute and Radboud University, have discovered that a large majority of people make the same sort of associations between sounds and colours and that language plays an important role in this. They are ‘synesthetes’ – their brains combine various senses. For 1 out of every 25 people, these sorts of unconscious associations between numbers and colours are quite normal. A new study in Nijmegen has shown that 70 percent of us have a systematic preference for how sounds and colours go together. Do you ever have the feeling that a specific colour – red, for example – goes well with a certain number or a certain sound? Well, you’re not the only one.
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