As cores no processamento do significado: provérbios e sinestesia

Abstract

Synesthesia phenomena are understood and referred to differently within Psychology and Classical Rhetoric. Both areas / regard synesthesia as a perception that crosses stimuli of different sensorial areas. This can be verified when the individual refers to certain perception through stimuli of a perceptual area usually linked to another area of perception (associating, for example, letters to colors). Within Psychology, synesthesia is usually linked to pathologies, considering synesthetic associations as non-normal connections; within Classical Rhetoric, synesthesia is understood as a figure of speech (a "figure of style") that allows to decorate verbal expressiveness.

Recent cognitive studies, however, seem to evidence in so many cases the non-randomness of synesthesia, even within the so-called synesthetic brains. In so doing, the so-called synesthesia phenomena (such as associating a color with a letter, with a sound, a word or a phrase not directly referring to color itself) may not be as random as previously thought.

A set of 843 surveys was conducted involving 9 proverbs not directly linked to color ( like for example "Who wants everything, loses everything") in order to understand the greater or lesser arbitrariness and randomness of the association established between colors and linguistic structures of relatively autonomous meaning such as proverbs. The respondent was / Respondents were asked to associate a color with the presented proverb. The purpose is to verify if some / whether or not some systematicity can be found in the linguistic-cognitive processing of the association between colors and the meaning of words and phrases not including / which / that do not include specific direct references to color.