Multicolored words: Uncovering the relationship between reading mechanisms and synesthesia

Blazej, Laura J.; Cohen-Goldberg, Ariel M.

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.11.017

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…One could point out that we also do not have sufficient evidence that it is not safe to ignore them, but I am not proposing hypotheses, but rather advocating research design based on evidence rather than assumptions. Only two studies to date have explicitly obtained multiple colours per word in an experimental setting: our compound words study [12], and a case study by Blazej & Cohen-Goldberg [10]. In both these studies, the one-versus two-colour difference was of experimental interest, but to date, no study has investigated how many colours synaesthetes experience or report per word as a baseline or as a function of length, morphological structure, frequency, etc.…”

Section: Number Of Colours Per Wordmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further discussion is forthcoming in Mankin and Simner [32]. 2 Researchers have used the term 'dominant' to describe the strongest colour in a compound word [12] and the most influential letter in determining a whole word's colour ( [9,10,14,21]; etc.). However, the quality of 'letter dominance' described at present is a different characteristic, apparently referring to an intrinsic quality of the letter itself; i.e.…”

Section: Endnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For subsequent research in this area, the goal is not only to better describe and understand synaesthesia but to use these systematic correspondences between language and colour to test theories regarding various linguistic and psycholinguistic processes. Thus far, several areas of psycholinguistic interest have been investigated using synaesthesia, including morphological processing [10][11][12], visual word recognition [13,14] and grapheme acquisition [15,16]. However, this focus on correspondences between linguistic features of words (such as frequency or morphological structure) and particular features of their synaesthetic colours (such as their hue, saturation and luminance) has resulted in, or at least coincided with, a narrowing of the variables collected to investigate these patterns.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Deepening understanding of language through synaesthesia: a call to reform and expand

Mankin

2019

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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In this paper, I present arguments and suggestions for the improvement of the scientific study of synaesthesia, and particularly grapheme-colour synaesthesia in relation to psycholinguistic research, although the principles I advocate can be easily adapted to any subfield of synaesthesia study. I postulate that the current state of research on synaesthesia in general, and on grapheme-colour synaesthesia in particular, suffers from a lack of exploratory evidence and essential groundwork upon which to build hypothesis-testing studies. In particular, I argue that synaesthesia research has been artificially bounded by assumptions about the nature of synaesthetic experiences, which constrain both the questions that researchers ask and the way in which they go about answering those questions. As a specific example, I detail how much of the current research on grapheme-colour synaesthesia is built to accommodate two major assumptions about the nature of colours for letters and for words—assumptions which I will contend are not universally true, and the exceptions to which point to a much richer and heterogeneous understanding of synaesthetic experience than current research practices capture. The top-down predetermination of what is important or meaningful to measure, and what is not, has subsequently impeded a full understanding of what synaesthesia is and how it works. I argue that these assumptions must be carefully addressed and evaluated, both for the particular case of grapheme-colour synaesthesia and for the field as a whole, to move towards a holistic and fruitful understanding of synaesthesia as a phenomenon and as a tool to study language, thought and perception. To that end, I propose specific recommendations for synaesthesia researchers to solidify and expand their understanding and to capture the actual experience of synaesthetes. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Bridging senses: novel insights from synaesthesia’.

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Section: Number Of Colours Per Wordmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Endnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Deepening understanding of language through synaesthesia: a call to reform and expand

Mankin

2019

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Do the colors of your letters depend on your language? Language-dependent and universal influences on grapheme-color synesthesia in seven languages

Root

Asano

Melero

et al. 2021

Consciousness and Cognition

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Grapheme–Color Synesthesia in an Abugida: a Bengali Case Study

2020

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Grapheme–color synesthetes experience graphemes (e.g., letters of the alphabet) as having a specific, consistent color. Most studies of grapheme–color synesthesia have only examined synesthetes in English, leaving underexplored the question of how synesthetic phenomenology might differ in languages that do not use alphabets. In particular, grapheme–color synesthesia in an abugida (a segmental writing system in which vowels are added to consonant graphemes using ‘accent’-like diacritical marks) has never been studied. Here, we present a case study of a Bengali synesthete, MJ, the first report of a grapheme–color synesthete in an abugida. First, we show that for MJ, diacritics influence the overall color of the consonant grapheme they modify, ‘pulling’ it toward the color she experiences for the vowel. Second, we describe and analyze the complex synesthetic experiences reported by MJ for conjunct graphemes, a unique orthographic feature of Brahmi-derived scripts (such as Bengali) in which multiple graphemes are visually combined into a single ‘merged’ grapheme. Finally, we show that in addition to these language-specific features, MJ’s synesthetic associations are influenced by some of the same linguistic properties (such as orthography and phonology) that influence synesthetic associations in other languages. We conclude that the idiosyncratic features of MJ’s synesthesia reflect unique properties of the Bengali writing system, that more studies of synesthesia in non-alphabetic scripts are needed, and that synesthetic phenomenology can offer insights into how linguistic properties shape grapheme representation in the brain.

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Multicolored words: Uncovering the relationship between reading mechanisms and synesthesia

Cited by 5 publications

References 79 publications

Deepening understanding of language through synaesthesia: a call to reform and expand

Deepening understanding of language through synaesthesia: a call to reform and expand

Do the colors of your letters depend on your language? Language-dependent and universal influences on grapheme-color synesthesia in seven languages

Grapheme–Color Synesthesia in an Abugida: a Bengali Case Study

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