Linguistic synesthesia in language contact: Sino-Korean vs. native Korean synesthetic compounds

Abstract This study examines whether linguistic synesthesia shares mapping directionality across languages and cultures in terms of language contact. This motivation has led to the examination of Sino-Korean synesthetic compounds compared to native Korean ones. A comparative analysis of Sino-Korean and native Korean synesthesia proposes that language contact has observed linguistic variations in transfer directionality in linguistic synesthesia. In other words, this study’s results show that Sino-Korean compound synesthesia has a directionality model similar to Mandarin Chinese, which differs from previous universality models. In contrast, native Korean compound synesthesia directionality follows diagrams from Korean synesthesia research and previous studies based on Indo-European languages.