Embodiment in Multimodal Semantics: Comparing Sensory, Emotional, and Visual Features in Chinese Color Metaphors

Yufeng Wu, Meichun Liu


Abstract
This study examines how sensory-motor experience, emotional valence and arousal, and visual image statistics contribute to multimodal alignment in Chinese color metaphors. Using 184 metaphorical lexemes from six basic color terms, we combined textual data from the Chinese Corpus Internet (CCI 3.0) with image sets from Baidu, embedding both with Chinese-CLIP and measuring alignment via cosine similarity. Sensory-motor ratings, particularly effector exclusivity and tactile strength, correlated negatively with alignment, while emotional valence showed strong positive correlations and visual features such as color variability and entropy contributed positively. Regression and importance analyses confirmed emotion as the most reliable predictor, with sensory ratings offering little explanatory power. The findings indicate that affective salience and perceptual richness, rather than generalized sensory norms, are central to the embodied grounding of metaphorical words in multimodal contexts.
Anthology ID:
2025.rocling-main.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING 2025)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
National Taiwan University, Taipei City, Taiwan
Editors:
Kai-Wei Chang, Ke-Han Lu, Chih-Kai Yang, Zhi-Rui Tam, Wen-Yu Chang, Chung-Che Wang
Venue:
ROCLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
249–257
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.rocling-main.26/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Yufeng Wu and Meichun Liu. 2025. Embodiment in Multimodal Semantics: Comparing Sensory, Emotional, and Visual Features in Chinese Color Metaphors. In Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING 2025), pages 249–257, National Taiwan University, Taipei City, Taiwan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Embodiment in Multimodal Semantics: Comparing Sensory, Emotional, and Visual Features in Chinese Color Metaphors (Wu & Liu, ROCLING 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.rocling-main.26.pdf