Japanese Word―Color Associations with and without Contexts

Japanese Word–Color Associations with and without Contexts Jun Harashima Cookpad Inc. Yebisu Garden Place Tower 12F, 4-20-3 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, 150-6012, Japan jun-harashima@cookpad.com Abstract Although some words carry strong associations with specific colors (e.g., the word danger is associated with the color red), few studies have investigated these relationships. This may be due to the relative rarity of databases that contain large quantities of such information. Additionally, these resources are often limited to particular languages, such as English. Moreover, the existing resources often do not consider the possible contexts of words in assessing the associations between a word and a color. As a result, the influence of context on word–color associations is not fully understood. In this study, we constructed a novel language resource for word–color associations. The resource has two characteristics: First, our resource is the first to include Japanese word–color associations, which were collected via crowdsourcing. Second, the word–color associations in the resource are linked to contexts. We show that word–color associations depend on language and that associations with certain colors are affected by context information. Keywords: word–color associations, contexts 1. Introduction Some words are associated with colors (i.e., danger and red) and these associations play important roles in informa- tion visualization. For example, red is used to successfully strengthen the message given by stop signs (i.e., danger). However, few studies have investigated word–color associ- ations. This is because few available resources include a wide range of word–color associations. Additionally, such resources are often limited to particular languages (e.g., En- glish). Moreover, the word–color associations included in the ex- isting resources are generally not linked to any contexts. Consequently, in assessing the associations between a word and a color, previous studies may not have considered the possible contexts of the word (Mohammad, 2011; Volkova et al., 2012; Lafourcade et al., 2014). Thus, the influence of context on word–color associations is not fully understood. Our study represents two main contributions to linguistic research: The first is the construction of the initial resource for exploring Japanese word–color associations. As de- scribed above, the existing resources are limited to spe- cific languages. We collected word–color associations in Japanese with the goal of making them available to re- searchers engaged in word–color association research. The second contribution of this report is the communica- tion of our findings regarding the effects of context infor- mation on word–color associations. As in previous stud- ies, we asked participants to name a color that they associ- ated with a presented word. We presented each word with several contexts and collected multiple word–color associ- ations for each context. We compared the associations ob- tained for words with and without contexts to examine how context affects word–color associations. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Sec- tion 2. briefly describes relevant previous studies. Sec- tion 3. explains how we collected Japanese word–color as- sociations with and without contexts. Section 4. reports our findings based on the collected data, and our conclusions are presented in Section 5.. …

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