{"id":1042,"date":"2025-02-25T11:20:05","date_gmt":"2025-02-25T11:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/?p=1042"},"modified":"2025-02-25T14:27:25","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T14:27:25","slug":"the-people-who-see-foreign-languages-how-synaesthesia-can-help-language-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/the-people-who-see-foreign-languages-how-synaesthesia-can-help-language-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"The people who ‘see’ foreign languages: How synaesthesia can help language learning"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Synaesthesia is a neurological condition found to enhance memory and learning. Now, scientists say seeing in colour could help when it comes to learning a second language.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

My mother’s name is the colour of milk. The strings of an acoustic guitar, when strummed, play the warm yellow of honeycomb. The sound is flat, hard and smooth. And Monday is pink. These sensations are always the same, and always present. This is synaesthesia \u2013 in my case\u00a0grapheme-colour synaesthesia<\/a>,\u00a0sound-colour synaesthesia<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0sound-texture synaesthesia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Like\u00a0many synaesthetes<\/a>, I discovered at a young age I had a flair for both music and languages. In music, it wasn’t the physical act of performing I excelled at, but composition. I went on to become a composer for short films and\u00a0dance theatre<\/a>, and a sound editor for television. Writing music felt a lot like a language to me, as I “saw” the colours of the sounds in a similar way. I also studied French, German, Spanish and linguistics \u2013 the colour of language helping me to remember words as well as the patterns of grammar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon that causes an estimated\u00a04.4% of people<\/a>\u00a0to experience the world as a cacophony of sensations. Around\u00a060 different types of synaesthesia<\/a>\u00a0have been identified, but there could be\u00a0more than 100<\/a>, with some types\u00a0experienced in clusters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The condition is thought to be caused by\u00a0genetically inherited traits<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0affect the structural and functional development<\/a>\u00a0of the brain.\u00a0Increased communication between sensory regions in the brain<\/a>\u00a0means, for example,\u00a0words can stimulate taste<\/a>,\u00a0sequences of numbers may be perceived in spatial arrangements<\/a>, or the feel of\u00a0textures\u00a0might conjure\u00a0emotions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Synaesthesia is not considered to be a neurological disorder and \u2013 although it has been linked to neurodevelopmental\u00a0and mental health conditions including\u00a0autism<\/a>,\u00a0anxiety<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0schizophrenia<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 it is described as an “alternative perceptual reality<\/a>” and generally thought to be\u00a0beneficial<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“When I was younger\u00a0I knew I saw the world in a different way, and my way of describing that to others was ‘colourful’,” says Smadar Frisch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Frisch, who has\u00a0grapheme-colour synaesthesia<\/a>,\u00a0sound-colour synaesthesia<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0lexical\u2013gustatory<\/a>\u00a0synaesthesia \u2013 where words have taste \u2013 explores the world of senses through her podcast,\u00a0Chromatic Minds<\/a>, and is currently writing her first book on the subject. “Learning in school was too much for me sensory-wise,” she says. “It is very difficult trying to solve an equation\u00a0when all the colouring of a series of numbers was a psychedelic\u00a0blast.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

This explosion of colour, says Frisch, would cause her to lose focus and forget what she was doing. “[It was the] same with language. The words’ colours, music and taste sensations ignited me and I wanted to express myself so much \u2013 that I lost focus.”<\/p>\n

\n

It wasn’t until she’d almost finished high school that she came across Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman’s book,\u00a0Wednesday is Indigo blue<\/a>. “My initial thought was that Wednesday is actually orange \u2013 and I needed to get this book.” This was a turning point for Frisch.\u00a0“I finally understood how my synaesthete brain is linked and wired. And I thought to myself, this phenomenon is amazing. I can use the colours to help me learn, rather than confuse me.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Frisch developed a colour coding system to help her learn new languages\u00a0fluently and quickly. Studying languages no longer felt confusing but “organised”, she says. “And it worked! My whole world changed. I went on to learn the thing my brain was meant to excel in: languages.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Frisch says she was able to learn French and Spanish fluently in just two months. “I scored 90+ on each [French and Spanish] exam,” she says. Today Frisch can speak seven languages fluently \u2013 and says she can learn any language she wants “with no difficulty, in a short matter of time”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Julia Simner is director of the\u00a0Multisense Synaesthesia Research<\/a>\u00a0laboratory at the University of Sussex in the UK. She and her team tested around 6,000 children who were six to 10 years old. “We screened each one individually for synaesthesia, and then gave [them] a battery of tests to determine\u00a0what skills come with synaesthesia<\/a>,” she says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The study found that the children with synaesthesia were better in a number of skills than the children without \u2013 skills which, according to Simner, would “certainly help both first and second language learning”.<\/p>\n

\n

“Specifically, they were significantly better in\u00a0receptive vocabulary (how many words they could understand), productive vocabulary (how many words they knew how to say), short term memory store, attention to detail and creativity,” Simner says. “These syn-linked skills predict that we might well expect second-language learning to be easier for someone with synaesthesia.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Having synaesthetic colours, she says, makes letters more memorable. And the synaesthesia colours can pass from one language into the second language learned, making words in the second language more memorable too. “The way these colours seep across languages can either be via the way the letter looks or the way the letter sounds,” says Simner. “It’s like the colour scaffolds across from one language to another.”<\/p>\n

\n

In 2019, another experiment led by psychologists at the University of Toronto, Canada, found grapheme-colour synaesthesia, where each letter and number has its own distinct colour, provides a significant\u00a0advantage in statistical learning<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 allowing a person to “see” patterns \u2013 an ability critical to language learning.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The researchers asked participants to listen to a set of nonsense words \u2013 for example, “muh-keh” and “beh-od” \u2013 representing\u00a0an artificial “language”.<\/p>\n

\n

They then listened to a second set of words. This set included the original artificial words, plus new artificial words which represented a “foreign” language. The participants were then asked to distinguish “words” from each of the two artificial languages.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“It didn’t have meaning,” says Amy Finn, psychologist and director of the University of Toronto’s cognitive neuroscience and developmental laboratory,\u00a0Finn Land Lab<\/a>. “It was constructed to look at ‘segmentation’ \u2013 or how you use regularities to pull out what the segments of language\u00a0even are. This is a very early but super important problem in early language learning.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The results showed grapheme-colour synaesthetes were better\u00a0able to differentiate between the two “languages”<\/a>\u00a0than participants who didn’t have synaesthesia. “We think [synaesthesia] can help you parse the chunks of language more easily,” says Finn.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

When synaesthetes experience the same patterns with more than one sense \u2013 for example, both aurally\u00a0and\u00a0visually \u2013 their mind conjures a bonus secondary cue which can help them recognise or remember the pattern.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

Take 11-year-old me, put on the spot in my first week of secondary school. “How do you say ‘work’?” demands my French teacher. The class is silent. I know the word is blue. Then it comes to me. “Travail,” I answer. Sometimes I can’t remember a word \u2013 but I can remember the colour. This can be frustrating because no one can help me if I say “it’s pink”, as the colours are unique to my own mind. On the other hand, colour acts as an extra reminder, a bonus cue I can put to use when learning languages.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

You might think, then, that synaesthesia would be more prevalent in bilingual children. But research suggests that people who\u00a0learn a second language later than early childhood<\/a>\u00a0are more likely to have this sensory-switching ability than those who are natively bilingual. This bolsters the theory that synaesthesia develops as a\u00a0learning tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Synaesthesia\u00a0emerges in childhood<\/a>, as a child starts to take in the world around them, and they learn to talk, read and write. A 2016 study by researchers in Canada, the US and the Czech Republic found that children learn to categorise colours between ages of four and seven years, around the time they begin learning to read and write, and\u00a0synaesthesia then begins to emerge from the age of six<\/a>. The authors of the study surmise: “Children use their newly-acquired ability to categorise colour as an unorthodox aid in mastering the domain of letters and words.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

However, synaesthesia can, on occasion, make communication more difficult \u2013 and the suggestion that synaesthesia might function as a strategy to facilitate learning “remains a topic of debate”, says Lucie Bouvet, a psychologist at the University of Toulouse, France.<\/p>\n

\n

Phoneme-colour synaesthesia [is where] all phonemes \u2013 the smallest unit of spoken meaning \u2013 evoke the perception of specific colours,” saysBouvet. This is the experience of a woman identified as ‘VA’ in\u00a0a 2023 paper<\/a>\u00a0co-authored by Bouvet. For instance, every time VA hears a hard “a” sound, she sees luminous cyan. Every time she hears “k”, she sees red.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

“VA describes a way of thinking in images, where words function as a second language,” says Bouvet. “The colours evoked by phonemes help her to access meaning.” VA’s process of communication is to hear the sounds, then see the colours, then translate meaning from those colours.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

This double translation effort could cause VA to lose track of conversations. “In rare cases, individuals may find their synaesthesia overwhelming, feeling that their internal experiences interfere with their perception of the external world,”\u00a0explains Bouvet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Whether helpful or not to the synaesthete, research into synaesthesia can help us to\u00a0understand cognitive processes<\/a>\u00a0of language and perception. “Synaesthesia is an intriguing phenomenon in itself,” says Bouvet. “But recent research suggests that it is part of a broader, specific cognitive profile. Identifying this unique cognitive profile may be key to gaining a deeper understanding of synaesthesia.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

For me, living life with a mishmash of sensations brings joy. Listening to music is a fully immersive experience. I sink into an ocean of texture, as if I’m under a soft duvet or submersed in cool water. The words of a book are not just inert ink on a page, but bring the story to life as they swirl around me. And language fills the air in a kaleidoscope of colour.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Synaesthesia is a neurological condition found to enhance memory and learning. Now, scientists say seeing in colour could help when it comes to learning a second language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1043,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,54],"tags":[19,36,15],"class_list":["post-1042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","category-worldwide","tag-featured","tag-technology","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1159,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions\/1159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}