Synesthetic Elements Are Common to All Modes of Language Processing
The study of synesthetic modes of language processing may reveal something about the idiosyncratic nature of all language processing, because research indicates that all language processing contains sensory components.
It is important to understand that synesthetic perceptions do not always involve words triggering perceptions of color; they can also involve, among other combinations, sounds triggering perceptions of shapes. In his fascinating series of BBC Reith Lectures, titled “The Emerging Mind,” Ramachandran offers an example. Look at the two shapes below. Which shape is the kiki, and which shape is the booba?
Did you answer that the image on the left is the booba, the one on the right the kiki? If so, you have answered as 98 percent of the population does. But why do most of us answer like this? Because we are making a cross-sensory, synesthetic connection between sharpness of sound and sharpness of shape.
As Ramachandran explains, “Look at the kiki and look at the sound kiki. They both share one property, the kiki visual shape has a sharp inflexion and the sound kiki represented in your auditory cortex, the hearing centers in the brain, also has a sharp sudden inflexion of the sound and the brain performs a cross-modal synesthetic abstraction saying the only thing they have in common is the property of jaggedness. That’s why they’re both kiki …”
Some years ago, I was doing research for a book on synesthesia (my own experience of colored words had led me to contact neuroscientists and other colored-word synesthetes in an effort to understand more about the phenomenon). While interviewing a given synesthete about his or her regular experience of colored words, I found that there would often be someone else in the vicinity (a friend or spouse) who, upon hearing the synesthetic description, would be prompted to report features of their own regular inner language experience. Often, the person would say something like, “Well, I don’t experience colored words, but …” and then would relate a personal way of coding language that was not quite like anything I’d ever heard before. It also became clear that, as the person described the inner perception, s/he became more conscious of its features, often finding it revealing.
It is important to point out that, as in the case of strong color-lexical synesthesia, the perceptions reported are not occasional events, but regular and consistent. The perception always happens in response to a given language trigger. This consistency, considered a hallmark of synesthetic experience, seemed to be a true of the other descriptions I received as well.
Can “Personal Codes” for Language be Useful as a Language Study Tool?
I began collecting such reports of inner perceptions of language because I found them fascinating — but I also wondered if they could be used in a practical way to promote memory or language learning. If a person became more conscious of his or her way of coding language, could this “personal code” be used as a learning tool, suggesting ways the individual might best absorb and retain language?
The “personal language code” descriptions I collected range from practical to poetic. Wen Xeng, a young woman attending my writing class, told me, “Whenever I am writing in Chinese and looking for a word, I get a picture of a screen in my mind — something like a TV or computer screen. When I think of the word, the character appears on my mental screen. My mental screen is really useful,” she continues, “but it only works in Chinese. I wish I could make the screen work when I am writing in English too. Then the English words I need could come up on the screen.”
Is Wen Xeng on to something? Might she use her naturally occurring language imagery to help her develop her writing in English, too? By reflecting on what we might call her “personal language code,” she may be able to develop it as a tool for more effective language learning. It is, after all, in that inner experience that learning happens. Wen Xeng could represent such imagery in her notes in a language-learning diary, perhaps a PC diary in which such visual imagery might be easily represented.
Another “personal language code” description comes from Laurent Schlemmer, a journalist and translator who reported an inner kinetic experience of language when translating from her native French into German — languages with differing word order. “Whenever I translate a sentence from French into German, I have an inner sensation of flying with the verb to the end of the sentence,” Laurent says. “Because the verb comes at the end of the sentence in German, there is a real inner sense of moving with the language. I inwardly see the sentence and also ‘fly’ above it with the verb that has to move to accomplish the translation.”
Laura Glenn is an editor whose inner language experience combines kinetic and visual elements. “Whenever I am editing and looking for a word that is right on the tip of my tongue but I cannot quite access it,” she says, “I get an inner sensation of walking through mist. When the mist clears, the elusive word appears, written in the clearing.”
Laura Glenn’s description may strike us as particularly poetic — almost metaphorical — but as researcher V. S. Ramachandran tells us, there may be a reason for that. The angular gyrus, the part of the brain involved in the sequencing of letters (the process one needs to spell a word) is also involved in metaphor-making. Thus, it may not be surprising if the very act of searching for a word takes the mental form of a metaphorical image, e.g., “walking through mist.”
The renowned poet Marie Ponsot, recipient of the 2005 Robert Frost Medal for Poetry, said in her acceptance speech for the award, “No two people have language in mind in quite the same way…With our language to think with and through, with language to bind and loose memory, we have access to that boundless … world where we are whole because we are on our own and therefore, incomparable.”
One way the uniqueness of language processing expresses itself in some individuals is in their experience of “colored words.” Color figures prominently in the language processing of color-lexical synesthetes because the angular gyrus is located next to a part of the brain involved in aspects of color processing (called “area V-4”). Such cross-activation can lead to the kinds of perceptions that synesthete and writer Alison Motluck reports: “…the glorious cherry red of an ‘S’ … the buffed black of an ‘R’ … the ugly, powdery pale blue of the letter ‘P,’ the splendid rich purple of ‘V’ … ‘I’ and ‘O’ …”
