As previous studies show that the auditory domain is the main target of synaesthetic transfers (Ullmann, 1957;Williams, 1976), the near synonyms, 聲 sheng "sound" and 音 yin "sound" in Mandarin Chinese, should be good candidates for our research, which have been established to represent different semantic/cognitive focuses on the sound.
speaking, 聲 is concentrated on the auditory production, while 音 is focused on the auditory perception, although both can refer to the sound (Hong and Huang, 2004;Hong and Huang, 2005).