Synesthesia and Chinese characters
Language Log has an interesting discussion up on synesthesia in Chinese characters, starting with the following reader question:
I’m curious to know whether, in your years studying and teaching written Chinese, you’ve ever come across synaesthesia as applied to Chinese characters (zi) or words (ci)?
The most common form of synaesthesia (~1% of people, I think) involves the systematic assignment of colours to letters, numbers or (sometimes) whole words. I have this ‘grapheme-colour’ quite strongly: when I hear a phone number or see a number written on a page, for example, I automatically sense it as bands of colour. Much the same for words: it literally bothers me when I don’t know how to spell someone’s name, as their associated colours can be so different […] Sounds a bit loopy to people who don’t do this, but it’s a very useful mnemonic trick when learning French vocab or Latin verb conjugations and noun declensions.
As far as I know, though, most of the research on synaesthesia has involved subjects who use the Latin alphabet – not sinograms.
The comments, which are also worth reading, also start getting into how synesthesia works for new writing systems that one acquires in adulthood.
For me, I’ve never tried to learn Chinese characters, but I do have synesthesia for the Greek alphabet and the IPA, which I learned fairly young and which have a lot of similarities to the Latin alphabet. (One peculiarity I’ve noticed is that lowercase nu (ν), which looks like v, has the colour of v when I’m not thinking about it but I can “convince” it to take on the colour of n when I concentrate, kind of by thinking of it as a sloppily written n. On the other hand, eta (Η η) which in uppercase looks like H and in lowercase like n, simply won’t take on the colour of e.)
I’ve also spent some time with the Arabic alphabet and Japanese hiragana, but not enough that I can sight read them, and I find any colour associations there to be weak and unreliable. (Kaf ك and lam ل have the colours of k and l, but they also have similar shapes to them. Most of the other symbols are murkier than that.) I wonder if this would change if I became more fluent, as some people in the Language Log comments describe.
Any other synesthetes want to weigh in?
(Please note that seeing the “wrong” colours associated with particular graphemes, even just by mention, is uncomfortable for some synesthetes, myself included, so I’d greatly appreciate if people could keep their discussion abstract, as in “the colour of b” or “b has a colour” so that those of us who are bothered by this can simply substitute in our own “b” colour. Note that the Language Log post does contain specific grapheme-colour mentions.)