Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Crossmodal correspondences are associations between perceptual features from different senses that aid in crossmodal binding. The semantic coding of these correspondences is expected to capture and mediate the emergence of perceptual crossmodal correspondences. However, the cross-cultural nature of such semantic coding has not been thoroughly studied. This research involved five languages across three different linguistic families (English, Dutch, Turkish, Chinese and Italian). Using distributional semantics, modality exclusivity norms and emotional lexicons, networks were constructed to represent semantic crossmodal correspondences and assess their relationship with Valence, Arousal and Dominance. Results indicate that emotions, particularly Valence and Dominance, play pivotal roles in shaping the structure of semantic crossmodal correspondences networks across languages. Moreover, the findings reveal that some types of semantic crossmodal correspondences might be shared among different languages in various language families, suggesting shared cognitive processes. This supports the significance of emotions as fundamental components in semantic crossmodal correspondences. Additionally, the study provides evidence supporting shared crossmodal correspondences among languages and cultures.