Multicolored words: Uncovering the relationship between reading mechanisms and synesthesia

Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior
Laura J Blazej, Ariel M Cohen-Goldberg

Abstract

Grapheme-color and lexical-color synesthesia, the association of colors with letters and words, respectively, are some of the most commonly studied forms of synesthesia, yet relatively little is known about how synesthesia arises from and interfaces with the reading process. To date, synesthetic experiences in reading have only been reported in relation to a word's graphemes and meaning. We present a case study of WBL, a 21-year old male who experiences synesthetic colors for letters and words. Over 3 months, we obtained nearly 3000 color judgments for visually presented monomorphemic, prefixed, suffixed, and compound words as well as judgments for pseudocompound words (e.g., carpet), and nonwords. In Experiment 1, we show that word color is nearly always determined by the color of the first letter. Furthermore, WBL reported two separate colors for prefixed and compound words approximately 14% of the time, with the additional color determined by the first letter of the second morpheme. In Experiment 2, we further investigated how various morphological factors influenced WBL's percepts using the compound norms of Juhasz, Lai, and Woodcock (2014). In a logistic regression analysis of color judgments for nearly 400 compounds, we o...Continue Reading

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Citations

Oct 22, 2019·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Jennifer L Mankin
Jul 10, 2021·Behavior Research Methods·Patrick BoninAlain Méot

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