The directionality hypothesis says that low senses [TOUCH, TASTE] usually describe high senses [SOUND, VISION] in synesthetic metaphors, so color-taste metaphors should be inaccessible; however, newer work suggests that some color-taste metaphors are acceptable because of the types of adjectives in them. In this study, we examine how adjectival classification of color terms affects color-taste synesthetic metaphors and provide a frame-based explanation for metaphors that violate the rule. English speakers (N = 116; M = 55, F= 55, NB = 4, N/A = 2) judged acceptability in an online questionnaire of color-taste metaphors with different adjective types. To confirm, we assessed the mean accessibility for the items (1 = accessible, -1 = inaccessible) wherein a mean of zero was the reference level and would suggest no significant influence. The results show that there is a significant color-taste directionality (p < .001) for the metaphors.

The phenomenon of syntactic priming is well studied in the literature, but the mechanisms behind it are still under debate. In this study, we trained English-speaking participants in artificial language sequences with dependencies that are either adjacent or non-adjacent. The participants then wrote completions to relative clause (RC) fragments. We found that participants who learn non-adjacent dependencies in the artificial language, exhibit a bias to write high-attachment (non-adjacent) continuations for RCs, when compared to participants in a control condition who exhibit low-attachment (adjacent) biases in RCs. The implications for theories of syntactic priming and its relations to implicit learning are discussed.