Hue/Vowel Coupling?: Testing Hue With Vowels in Pseudowords

Sound symbolism is the connection between certain features of sound and certain traits in non-linguistic items. In previous research, sound symbolic associations have been found between the height and backness of vowels, the brightness (the trait of a colour being lighter or darker), and saturation (the intensity of a colour) of colours. These same studies have also found no consistent association between colour hue (the element of colour which defines its colour classification, such as red or blue) and vowel position. We examined whether there is an association between hue and vowel position features after controlling for saturation and brightness. We selected three colour pairs matched on saturation and brightness, but differing on hue: blue/yellow, purple/orange and red/green. Participants were shown each pair, along with a pseudoword, and asked to choose the colour that best matched the word. Three pseudowords contained the front-high vowel /i/ (as in see), and three pseudowords containing the low back vowel /ɑ/ (as in saw). We examined whether participants were more likely to choose a certain colour in each pair, for either type of pseudoword. We found no relationship for purple/orange and blue/yellow colour pairs. However, there was a statistically significant relationship for the red/green colour pair, such that green was associated with high front vowel pseudowords, and red with low back vowel pseudowords. This study was conducted as a pilot study in which we attempted to artificially create associations between vowels and different hues.