Studying speech perception in adolescent school-age children by utilizing primary color perception

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Perception Studies

Background:

• Speech and color perception both have significant implications in language.
• Recent advancements in general and color perception research make novel approaches feasible.
• This study investigates speech perception through the lens of color perception.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between color perception and speech perception.
• To determine if color associations can be used to analyze speech sound features.
• To explore a nontraditional method for studying speech perception.

Main Methods:

• Generated 144 pairs of nonsense consonant-vowel (CV) syllables using 12 consonants.
• Selected consonants to maximize phonological features with minimal phonemes.
• 46 junior high school students (ages 11-14) associated one of six primary colors with each syllable pair.

Main Results:

• Subjects' color judgments exhibited perceptual orderliness.
• Color associations successfully revealed underlying speech perception patterns.
• Identified retrieval of sameness, fronting (place), and voicing features.

Conclusions:

• Color perception can serve as a viable tool for studying speech perception.
• The study demonstrates a novel method linking visual perception (color) to auditory perception (speech).
• Findings support the potential of using cross-modal associations to understand linguistic features.