Fig. 1.

Hierarchical organization of the senses based on their purported contribution to conceptualization and mental activity, ranking from the ‘highest’ modality—sight—to the ‘lowest’ sense—namely, touch (e.g., see Cytowic, 1989a, b, 1993; Day, 1996; Müller et al., 2022; Tsur, 1992; Ullman, 1957; Williams, 1976). Arrows indicate the most common direction of the occurrence of synaesthetic metaphors that are found in literary sources (Day, 1996), nonliterary texts (Strik-Lievers & Huang, 2016), and in both sources (Shen and Aisenman, 2008). [Reproduced from Di Stefano et al., 2022a]