Linguistic Determinants of Word Colouring in Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia

Previous studies of grapheme-colour synaesthesia have suggested that words tend to be coloured by their initial letter or initial vowel (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 1993; Ward et al., 2005). We examine this assumption in two ways. First, we show that letter position and syllable stress have been confounded, such that the initial letters of a word are often in stressed position (e.g., 'wo-man, 'ta-ble, 'ha-ppy). With participant JW, we separate these factors (e.g., with stress homographs such as 'con-vict vs. con-'vict) and show that the primary determinant of word colour is syllable stress, with only a secondary influence of letter position. We show that this effect derives from conceptual rather than perceptual stress, and that the effect is more prominent for synaesthetes whose words are coloured by vowels than by consonants. We examine, too, the time course of word colour generation. Slower colour naming occurs for spoken versus written stimuli, as we might expect from the additional requirement of grapheme conversion in the former. Reaction time data provide evidence, too, of incremental processing, since word colour is generated faster when the dominant grapheme is flagged early rather than late in the spoken word. Finally, we examine the role of non-dominant graphemes in word colouring and show faster colour naming when later graphemes match the dominant grapheme (e.g., ether) compared to when they do not (e.g., ethos). Taken together, our findings suggest that words are coloured incrementally by a process of competition between constituent graphemes, in which stressed graphemes and word-initial graphemes are disproportionately weighted.