Synaesthesia in a logographic language: the colouring of Chinese characters and Pinyin/Bopomo spellings

Studies of linguistic synaesthesias in English have shown a range of fine-grained language mechanisms governing the associations between colours on the one hand, and graphemes, phonemes and words on the other. However, virtually nothing is known about how synaesthetic colouring might operate in non-alphabetic systems. The current study shows how synaesthetic speakers of Mandarin Chinese come to colour the logographic units of their language. Both native and non-native Chinese speakers experienced synaesthetic colours for characters, and for words spelled in the Chinese spelling systems of Pinyin and Bopomo. We assessed the influences of lexical tone and Pinyin/Bopomo spelling and showed that synaesthetic colours are assigned to Chinese words in a non-random fashion. Our data show that Chinese-speaking synaesthetes with very different native languages can exhibit both differences and similarities in the ways in which they come to colour their Chinese words.