The Cognitive Dynamics of Synesthesia and Metaphor

Abstract

Synesthesias appear in a wide variety of forms, but all involve meanings in nonlinguistic perceptual cognizing—which surely was much earlier in the human species than linguistic cognizing. As was noted earlier in connection with the Karwoski et al. research, when one of the “sensory” dimensions of perceptual parallelisms was represented by words—thus a shift away from synesthesia toward metaphor—the lawfulness of the process became even more apparent and stable across individuals. Nevertheless, the verbal nature of the usual Semantic Differential makes it inapplicable to many subject populations—members of nonliterature cultures, brain-damaged aphasics, thought-disordered schizophrenics, and children younger than about six years—and the need for a nonverbal graphic differential persisted. A study by Anderson, Pichert, et al. demonstrated, for a wide variety of sentence types with polysemous topics, that giving the predicted “instantiations” as cue words yielded significantly better recalls of the remainder of the sentences than the general topic words actually presented originally.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 60 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.