Bidirectional lexical–gustatory synesthesia

Abstract

In developmental lexical-gustatory synesthesia, specific words (inducers) can trigger taste perceptions (concurrents) and these synesthetic associations are generally stable. We describe a case of multilingual lexical-gustatory synesthesia for whom some synesthesias were bidirectional as some tastes also triggered auditory word associations. Evoked concurrents could be gustatory but also tactile sensations. In addition to words and pseudowords, many voices were effective inducers, suggesting increased connections between cortical taste areas and both voice-selective and language-selective areas. Lasting changes in some evoked tastes occurred during childhood suggesting that some plasticity can be present after the initial learning of associations. Inducers were often linked to taste concurrents phonologically or semantically, but also through identifiable childhood episodes (persons or events). Several inducers were phonologically linked to episodic inducers suggesting a process of secondary acquisition for many inducers. Implications of these observations are discussed.

Sound symbolism in synesthesia: Evidence from a lexical–gustatory synesthete

“…piano, thunder; Ward & Simner, 2003). This suggested initially that his synaesthesia may be restricted to speech sounds, although he has subsequently reported a synaesthetic experience (the flavour of porridge) when exposed to one particularly extreme environmental sound (noise at the base of Niagara Falls; see also Richer et al 2011). The genuineness of JIW's reports has been verified in previous studies by their considerable stability over time.…”

“…We also removed associations with food word inducers (e.g., coffee). This was important because food words tend to taste of themselves in lexical-gustatory synaesthesia (Richer et al, 2011;Ward & Simner, 2003) and may therefore artificially inflate sound symbolism in our analyses (i.e., any sound symbolism between word forms and taste in natural language would automatically be found in this type of direct mapping between word form and taste in JIW's synaesthesia). In total, we removed 47 items, leaving a dataset of 479 synaesthetic word-flavour associations.…”

“…Given synaesthetes' cross-modal superiority in decoding linguistic sound symbolism, we investigate here whether sound symbolism can be found at the very heart of inducer-concurrent pairings. We look particularly at the variant known as lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, in which hearing, speaking, reading, or thinking about words triggers sensations of flavour (Gendle, 2007;Jones, et al, 2011;Richer, Beaufils, & Poirier, 2011;Ward & Simner, 2003). We ask whether the reason particular words link to particular synaesthetic flavours is because certain phonological properties trigger specific taste categories.…”

Cross-modal, bidirectional priming in grapheme-color synesthesia

“…When the smaller line had the synesthetic color of a numerically larger number compared to that of the larger line, reaction times increased. Next to this case of explicit bidirectionality, there is evidence suggesting that bidirectionality is present at the behavioral level even in synesthetes for whom the explicit phenomenomenal relation between inducer and concurrent is unidirectional (Brugger, Knoch, Mohr, & Gianotti, 2004;Cohen Kadosh et al, 2005;Gebuis, Nijboer, & van der Smagt, 2009a, 2009bGevers, Imbo, Cohen Kadosh, Fias, & Hartsuiker, 2010;Johnson, Jepma, & De Jong, 2007;Knoch, Gianotti, Mohr, & Brugger, 2005;McCarthy, Barnes, Alvarez, & Caploviz, 2013;Richer, Beaufils, & Poirier, 2011;Weiss, Kalckert, & Fink, 2009). In the priming studies by…”

Auditory synesthesias

“…These include reports of 2 subjects who have concomitant auditory-visual and visual-auditory synesthesia (Goller et al, 2009), and a very unusual case of bidirectional lexical-gustatory synesthesia (Richer et al, 2011).…”