The UD Department of English Linguistics invites you to the following talk:
Parragi Flóra (University of Amsterdam): Regulatory factors on grapheme-colour associations: Insights from Hungarian-speaking synesthetes
Time: 30 October 2024, 12:00
Venue: UD main building, room 111
Grapheme-colour synesthesia, where specific colours are consistently associated with letters of the alphabet, has primarily been studied in Indo-European languages. The present paper explores synesthesia in Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language with unique linguistic features such as shallow orthographic depth, diacritics and digraphs in its alphabet, along with vowel harmony rules. We investigated previously tested Regulator Factors (RFs) such as Colour Term, Index Route, Letter Frequency, Visual Similarity, and Pronunciation Similarity, to see which factors could influence the synesthetic experience in Hungarian. We also added novel RFs which could influence the grapheme-colour pairings such as the Formant Frequency and digraph colour representations. Our findings revealed universal effects across several RFs, except for Letter Frequency, which did not significantly influence synesthetic grapheme-colour associations. Moreover, the significant result emerging from the Formant Frequency RF suggests its potential introduction to future studies. Additionally, our exploratory analysis revealed that a notable proportion of single graphemes have multi-colour associations and digraphs tended to be uni-coloured rather than multicoloured, challenging the traditional one-to-one mapping paradigm of grapheme-colour associations. This study underscores the significance of conducting multi-language synesthesia research, providing valuable insights into testing regulatory factors believed to be universal while also uncovering novel ones that might influence synesthetic experiences.