The neural basis of synesthetic expression processing with onomatopoeic words

2020 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 18K18520
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Research (Exploratory)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Medium-sized Section 2:Literature, linguistics, and related fields
• Research Institution: National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities
• Principal Investigator: Mizuochi-Endo Tomomi (水落智美) 国立障害者リハビリテーションセンター(研究所), 研究所 脳機能系障害研究部, 流動研究員 (90568859)
• Project Period (FY): 2018-06-29 – 2021-03-31
• Keywords: オノマトペ / 知覚 / 感覚 / 日本語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The original plan was to conduct an fMRI experiment, but this was not possible due to the time required to select words for stimuli and the interruption of the experiment by COVID-19.
However, the calculation of entropy (a measure of the ambiguity of information; the higher the value, the more nouns co-occur) showed that the entropy of onomatopoeic words, which represents a state, is low, while that of onomatopoeic words, which represents a sense of touch, is high. This indicated that the ambiguity of information differs depending on the meaning of the word itself. And, an investigation of the impressions given by words using onomatopoeic words and adjectives synonymous with onomatopoeic words showed that onomatopoeic words give a more concrete impression, and therefore the discomfort given by a phrase is greater than that of an adjective when it modifies a noun associated with a different sense.

Free Research Field

認知科学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究は、刺激の選定に時間を要したこと、COVID-19による実験中断により、脳機能計測実験の実施には至らなかった。
しかし、刺激選定のために実施したエントロピー算出や、語の印象調査は、両者とも対象となる語は従来の研究に比べて多い。また、得られたデータに対し、クラスター解析や相関解析などを行い、語と感覚との結びつきや、語句の与える印象のみならず、オノマトペの語義による情報の曖昧さの違いや、オノマトペと形容詞のもつ印象の具体性による異感覚間の語からなる句における違和感の違いを数値で示すことができた。本来主観的であるこれらの指標を客観的に示した本研究の成果は大きな意義があると考える。