A Study on the Sound Symbolism Between Red Tones and Their Complementary Colors in Japanese Traditional Colors

Abstract

The phenomenon where sounds themselves evoke certain images is called sound symbolism. Although numerous studies on sound symbolism have been reported, many aspects remain unexplained. The ultimate goal of our research is to elucidate the overall picture of sound symbolism. To achieve this, we aim to collect various examples and attempt to discover their unique sound symbolism. By integrating the many instances of sound symbolism obtained, we hope to clarify the overall picture of sound symbolism. In this study, we adopted " Japanese traditional color names," traditional Japanese color names, as a case believed to possess sound symbolism. Japanese traditional colors include red tones, blue tones, and various other colors, and we hypothesized that there might be sound symbolism present when naming these colors to evoke specific associations. In the experiment, we performed binary classification of Japanese traditional color names into "red tones" and "blue tones" classes. The classifier was constructed based on CNN, and for feature analysis, we used Grad-CAM, one of the XAI techniques. From the experimental results, we hypothesized that the consonant /b/ and the vowels /a/ and /o/ could serve as indicators to distinguish between colors. We will verify this hypothesis through subjective evaluation experiments and discuss the sound symbolism associated with the consonant /b/ and the vowels /a/ and /o/.