Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have found that character type, voicing, or vowel type affects the sensorimotor and affective information imagined from individual characters or pseudowords in Japanese. The purpose of this study was to examine whether character type, voicing, or vowel type influence the taste information imagined from individual characters. Fifty and seven participants rated five taste information (sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and spicy) imagined from five vowels (a, i, u, e, or o) written in hiragana or katakana, respectively, in Study 1. Additionally, 40 participants rated six taste information (sweet, salt, sour, umami, bitter, and spicy) imagined from pairs of three consonant types (voiced: b, semi-voiced: p, or voiceless: h or f) and five vowels written in hiragana in Study 2. The results of these studies suggest that character types, voicing, or vowel types affect the taste information associated with individual Japanese characters.