Colored Time: Cross-linguistic Investigation of Temporal-color Synaesthesia

6000

Synesthesia is a cognitive condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality consistently elicits involuntary experiences in another. Focusing on chromatic associations with time units, this project examines temporal-color synesthesia as a window into how the mind organizes abstract concepts such as time. The study compares four calendrical types based on the data drawn from a large-scale online database: Nominal-Alphabetic (e.g., English), Ordinal-Alphabetic (e.g., Portuguese), Ordinal-Logographic (e.g., Chinese), and Semantic-Logographic (e.g., Japanese). This framework allows systematic testing of the relative and hierarchical impacts of graphemic form, ordinal sequence, phonological form, and lexical meaning in shaping temporal-color mappings, and whether these cues gain different prominence in disparate languages. The research also investigates whether culturally salient temporal boundaries, e.g., week starts and weekends, generate measurable shifts in color space, and whether “Projector” and “Associator” profiles modulate these patterns. More broadly, the project explores how language and culture potentially mold cross-modal associations and what this reveals about the organization of abstract time in human cognition. SURF ID: SURF-2026-0338.

Patterns in cross-modal associations among languages and cultures; patterns of organization of abstract time in human cognition