Grounded cognition and the role of musical expertise in shaping synesthetic metaphors among a music speechcommunity

Abstract Synesthesia had been studied mainly as an early intersensory association in the brain, i.e., the experience of this phenomenon in synesthetes arises in childhood, or perhaps earlier, and lasts over a lifespan. However, empirical research provides extensive evidence that synesthesia might be induced or acquired at a later age and might surface in cognitive and verbal forms — through synesthetic metaphors, including bright sounds and loud colors . Although these examples demonstrate that we are all synesthetes, at least to some extent, the question that arises is whether musical expertise favors the development of certain types of synesthetic mappings that might prove meaningless outside the context where they have been produced and consolidated. Participants were recruited from three university centers, Music ( n = 25), Linguistics ( n = 25), and Engineering ( n = 25), to rate, in terms of comprehensibility, seventy synesthetic metaphors whose target domain is musical sound . As the music group is instructed on how to capture the nuances of musical sounds, this group might conceive of and verbalize such sounds distinctly. Participants’ responses, which were analyzed for statistical significance using a Chi-square test of independence, show that the music group’s rating statistically differs from that of the other groups, indicating that musical expertise does lead to the emergence of synesthetic metaphors specific to musical discourse.