Certain colors are strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g. red is hot, blue is cold). Some of these associations are grounded in visual experiences like seeing hot embers glow red. Surprisingly, many congenitally blind people show similar color associations, despite lacking all visual experience of color. Presumably, they learn these associations via language. Can we detect these associations in the statistics of language? And if so, what form do they take? We apply a projection method to word embeddings trained on corpora of spoken and written text to identify color-adjective associations as they are represented in language. We show that these projections are predictive of color-adjective ratings collected from blind and sighted people, and that the effect size depends on the training corpus. Finally, we examine how color-adjective associations might be represented in language by training word embeddings on corpora from which various sources of color-semantic information are removed.

How related is skin to a quilt or door to worry? Here, we show that linguistic experience strongly informs people’s judgments of such word pairs. We asked Chinese-speakers, English-speakers, and Chinese-English bilinguals to rate semantic and visual similarity between pairs of Chinese words and of their English translation equivalents. Some pairs were unrelated, others were also unrelated but shared a radical (e.g., “expert” and “dolphin” share the radical meaning “pig”), others also shared a radical which invokes a metaphorical relationship. For example, a quilt covers the body like skin; understand, with a sun radical, invokes understanding as illumination. Importantly, the shared radicals are not part of the pronounced word form. Chinese speakers rated word pairs with metaphorical connections as more similar than other pairs. English speakers did not even though they were sensitive to shared radicals. Chinese-English bilinguals showed sensitivity to the metaphorical connections even when tested with English words.

Why are some words more frequent than others? Some reasons are self-evident. A word like "eat" is far more communicatively useful than a word like "diagonalize". But robust differences in frequency are also observed for words with seemingly equal communicative usefulness. For example, hot and cold seem equally important for communicating temperature yet hot in English is more frequent than cold. We focused on antonym pairs such as these and sought to predict differences in frequency from the connection patterns of these words in a semantic network while controlling for predictors like the number of word senses. Two network properties predicted word frequency especially well: the number of connections the word and its surrounding words have, and the ability of the word to connect less interconnected words. These two network properties not only predicted present word frequency, but also predicted future frequency changes suggesting a potential causality relationship between network properties and word frequency. Overall, this study offers new insights into the underlying causes of differences in word frequency and highlights the importance of considering a network perspective when examining how word frequency evolves.

People have strong intuitions about which colors do and do not match particular pieces of music — a phenomenon often conceptualized through semantic mediation. We further explored the specific strategies people employ to navigate these color-music associations which offers crucial insights to identifying the cognitive mechanisms that enable such cross-domain associations. We show that while some people rely more on intuition, other people actively seek justification of association by consulting common linguistic descriptors, emotional contents, and environmental cues. We found that more spontaneous strategies lessen the role of semantic mediation, while more evaluative strategies, especially those involving the use of language, amplify it. Notably, the use of evaluative strategies introduced an asymmetrical effect for matching and mismatching colors. Additionally, individuals employing similar strategies associated a given music excerpt with more similar colors, suggesting that strategy alignment enhances the consistency of color-music associations. Interestingly, this pattern of convergence was not observed among individuals who predominantly relied on guessing.