Nicholas Root, University of Amsterdam
Grapheme-color synesthesia is a rare cognitive phenomenon in which orthographic symbols (such as letters of the alphabet) are automatically experienced as having a consistent color. In a multi-year international collaboration, we collected color associations from synesthetes (N > 1000) in more than 20 languages. Our data show that synesthetes’ associations – which letters get which colors – reflect underlying properties of the synesthete’s native language. We argue that synesthetic colors encode aspects of the computations and representations that support reading, making them a potential methodological tool for psycholinguistics – akin to reaction time or eye-tracking.
In this talk, I show how synesthetic colors are shaped by linguistic and other factors, then present two proof-of-concept studies that use these color associations to replicate classic findings in psycholinguistics. First, synesthetic colors show stronger phonetic influences in transparent orthographies, consistent with the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis. Second, the synesthetic color of Mandarin Chinese phono-semantic compounds often derives from the semantic rather than the phonetic radical, consistent with evidence for semantic-radical dominance in Chinese character processing.
Thus, synesthesia is not merely a perceptual curiosity but a novel methodological tool – a window into the cognitive architecture of reading and written language.