Using the Implicit Association Test to Investigate the Strength of Synesthetic Associations

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which experiences in one sensory or cognitive domain are associated with automatic, involuntary experiences in a second domain. The present study investigated the relationship between the consistency and strength of these associations in grapheme-color synesthesia, in which a specific color is experienced when seeing a particular letter or number. Firstly, synesthetic participants completed the online Synesthesia Battery (SB) which measures the consistency with which individuals choose the same color for the same grapheme and returns a standardized score which distinguishes genuine synesthetes from non-synesthetes. Secondly, synesthetes and age/gender-matched non-synesthetic control participants completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) which measures the strength of associations. In the IAT, two response keys were paired with the synesthetes’ two most consistent SB associations in either congruent (each key is associated with a grapheme and its correct synesthetic color, e.g., A + red, B + green) or incongruent (i.e., A + green, B + red) conditions. However, on each trial, only a single grapheme or color is presented and participants make speeded responses. We expected that synesthetes would respond more quickly and accurately when their grapheme/color associations were paired congruently (e.g., A/red, B/blue) as opposed to incongruently (i.e., A/blue, B/red). In contrast, non-synesthetic controls should show no significant difference between congruent and incongruent trials because they do not have pre-existing associations between graphemes and colors. To the extent that strong associations should also be consistent, we also expected a positive correlation between SB scores and congruency magnitudes in the synesthetes

The Handbook of Speech Perception

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/all_books/1525/thumbnail.jp

Prosody in speech as a source of referential information

<p>Although prosody has primarily been assumed to convey information regarding linguistic structure and speakers’ emotional state, increasing evidence suggests that prosody also conveys <i>referential</i> details. We examined the extent to which language users produce and infer information from prosodic correlates to perceptual details in the visual modality, specifically colour brightness. In Experiments 1 and 2, speakers labelled colours that varied in brightness with either familiar colour names (e.g. red; Exp. 1) or novel words (e.g. blicket; Exp. 2). Speakers used higher pitch, shorter duration, and higher amplitude for novel words, but not for familiar colour names, when labelling brighter versus darker shades. Listeners in Experiment 3 reliably inferred the intended target colour referent from the recorded utterances obtained in Experiment 2. Findings suggest that prosody reflects cross-modal correspondences between auditory and visual domains and, like a type of vocal gesture, provides an additional channel of information that resolves referential ambiguity.</p

Abstraction-based efficiency in the lexicon

Contains fulltext : 90732.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Listeners learn from their past experience of listening to spoken words, and use this learning to maximise the efficiency of future word recognition. This paper summarises evidence that the facilitatory effects of drawing on past experience are mediated by abstraction, enabling learning to be generalised across new words and new listening situations. Phoneme category retuning, which allows adaptation to speaker-specific articulatory characteristics, is generalised on the basis of relatively brief experience to words previously unheard from that speaker. Abstract knowledge of prosodic regularities is applied to recognition even of novel words for which these regularities were violated. Prosodic word-boundary regularities drive segmentation of speech into words independently of the membership of the lexical candidate set resulting from the segmentation operation. Each of these different cases illustrates how abstraction from past listening experience has contributed to the efficiency of lexical recognition.18 p