Language and Synesthesia

Abstract

Several years ago Roman Jakobson called to the attention of the writer, Gladys A. Reichard, the materials, meager enough though suggestive, on the relationship of sound and color. In his Kindersprache, A.phasie und Allgemeine Lautgesetze,1 Jakobson includes a brief discussion of the question and summarizes evidence of vowel coloration, as well as an interesting Czech case (hereafter referred to as S.P.) of consonant correlation with color. A year ago I gave for a class assignment the subject "How I memorize". One result was a short paper by Elizabeth Werth which gave rise to discussions the results of which we here summarize. We have found that these phenomena are not nearly so rare as is often supposed and feel that directing attention to them may disclose much of importance to the psychological and theoretical aspects of linguistics. Several linguists who are in a position to record the development of children's learning, aver that children take it for granted that sounds and words have color, but the child's assumption is either unrealized by adults, or if discovered, may be laughed at. In the course of the short, informal investigations reported in this paper it was found that some adults retain their early childhood pictures, and correlate with them other percepts. Moreover, though they love to speak of the qualities they assign to sounds, numbers, days, musical instruments and the like, they sometimes remark that they have always been ashamed of the synesthetic "pictures" and therefore have never talked about the subject; "people would laugh at them". Jakobson discussed the matter with a Swedish psychiatrist, remarking that it was normal for children to interpret sounds in terms of color. The skeptical psychiatrist replied that persons suffering from mental aberrations did so, but he could hardly believe it of normal individuals. Whereupon a ten-year-old girl was bluntly asked "What color is a?" Without surprise she answered and rapidly assigned colors to the Swedish vowels. Later an eight-year-old boy unhesitatingly repeated the feat. The materials here presented show th!J,t some normal adults, probably many more than we realize, synthesize sounds and other percepts. We do not expect to prove that there is necessarily a general pattern in which the synthesis is made, but there can be no doubt that forms of synesthesia exist in many minds, even though the details may differ. Moreover, there is sometimes remarkable correspondence between vowels and color even among persons speaking different languages. "How I memorize" was written by Elizabeth Werth, aged 21 years, a student at Barnard College, who learned Serbian and Hungarian as "first" languages. She speaks fluently French, German, English and Russian, learned in this order. She also reads Latin as indicated in her paper which follows: 1 Almquist and Wiksells Boktryckeri-A. B. Uppsala. 1941. 224 LANGUAGE AND SYNESTHESIA 225 For me memorizing began with the multiplication tables at the age of six. At first my mind was a complete blank and remained so for several months. The numbers just did not stick in my head, whereas my cousin of the same age achieved miracles in this field and gleefully pocketed all the colored pencils my father promised to the one who would first know the sacred tables. Green jealousy drove me to copy laboriously the multiplications 2 x 2 are 4, 3 x 3 are 9, 6 x 6 are 36. At last I reached a stage when I could close my eyes