Tasty non-words and neighbours: The cognitive roots of lexical-gustatory synaesthesia

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 110; no. 2; pp. 171 - 181
• Main Authors: Simner, Julia, Haywood, Sarah L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.02.2009; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adult; Association (Psychology); Biological and medical sciences; Child Development; Cognition; Cognition - physiology; Cognitive Processes; Female; Food; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Language; Language Processing; Male; Malus; Middle Aged; Names; Non-word; Olfaction. Taste; Perception; Pseudo-homophone; Psycholinguistics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Sensation Disorders - psychology; Senses; Spelling; Stimuli; Synaesthesia; Synesthesia; Taste; Taste - physiology; Word Lists; Word Recognition; Words; Young Adult; Synesthesia; Taste; Non-word; Synaesthesia; Pseudo-homophone; Human; Word; Lexicon; Gustative system; Homophone; Experimental study; Language; Gustation; Perception
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.11.008

For lexical-gustatory synaesthetes, words trigger automatic, associated food sensations (e.g., for JB, the word slope tastes of over-ripe melon). Our study tests two claims about this unusual condition: that synaesthetic tastes are associated with abstract levels of word representation (concepts/lemmas), and that the first tastes to crystallise in early development are those triggered by food-names (e.g., apple tastes of apple; Simner & Ward, 2006). This concept/lemma-based proposal is difficult to immediately reconcile with the finding that non-words may also generate tastes ( Ward, Simner, & Auyeung, 2005), since non-words have no concept/lemma representations. We manipulated the characteristics of non-words to provide three types of evidence that non-word tastes in fact stem from real word neighbours: Non-words with neighbours (e.g., keach) are more likely to generate tastes than those with no neighbours (e.g., vilps); pseudo-homophone non-words that are orthographically close to real words (e.g., peeple) are more likely to generate tastes than those that are more distant ( baybee); and finally, the tastes of non-words are less consistent, and less intense, than those of real words. Additionally, we test the hypothesis that synaesthetic tastes develop initially from food-names by showing that non-words are more intensely flavoured if they are homophonic with food-names (e.g., toffie) versus non-foods (e.g., peeple). From this we conclude that synaesthetic tastes develop from food-names, and that tasty non-words do not challenge a concept/lemma-based account of lexical-gustatory synaesthesia.