Witthoft and Winawer (2006)

From Psy3242

Grapheme Synesthesia

In this study, a grapheme synesthete performed various tests to study the relationship between letters and colors. The patient, named AED, reported synestheic experiences in English and Russian, that seemed to originate with a toy played in her childhood. The refrigerator magnets from AED's childhood fostered a letter-color relationship that lasted throughout her life, and transferred to the Cyrillic alphabet when AED moved to Russia.

Tests Administered on Synesthesia

AED chose the exact hue, brightness, and saturation of each color that paired with a particular letter. AED was presented in random order with the digits 0 to 9, and all 26 letters of the English alphabet, in both upper and lower cases. She performed a matching session on two separate occasions for consistency of the test's results. In a later test, she was also presented with 31 uppercase and 31 lowercase Cyrillic letters in the same manner.

Results

The letter-color associations from AED's childhood refrigerator magnets influenced the colors chosen for the letters presented in testing. Similar looking or sounding Cyrillic letters were designated with colors similar to those given for English letters. The researchers concluded that from English to Russian, the case and font of a letter modulated the color experienced by the synesthete; similar letters were similar colors. This experiment demonstrates the flexibility of AED's synesthesia, because she maintained the synestheic experiences from English to Russian. The study also shows the importance of early experience as a role in the development of synesthesia, since the color experiences began during childhood as a result of playing with the refrigerator magnets. The researchers believed the magnets to be the originating inducer of the grapheme synesthesia experienced by AED.