Essay On Synesthesia

Being a psychology student, one learns many amazing things that can happen to people. One of them includes synesthesia. Synesthesia is a natural occurrence where a person experiences multiple senses at one time. For example, somebody with synesthesia may see a color when somebody is talking to them. Another example is when they touch something, they also experience smell. This happens without the person trying at all. One of the most popular types of synesthesia is Grapheme. This means that people see letters and numbers in colors automatically without any effort. Most people with synesthesia experience it their whole life, so what implications does it have on synesthetes childhood, especially when being and school with other children who are considered typical students? We will look at several studies that have observed children with synesthesia and their experiences in the education system.

In a study done by Maurer, Gibson, and Spector (2013) they looked at synesthesia in infants and young children. “Synesthesia will be a normal phase in typical development, either before

experience-depending pruning is complete, or before inhibition has emerged and been consolidated” (Maurer, Gibson, and Spector, 2013, p. 2). The three researchers had two hypotheses going into the study. The first one is even in adults without synesthesia, their “cross-sensory and cross-dimensional connections” (Maurer, Gibson, and Spector, 2013, p. 2) are still in existence because of uncompleted inhibition. Their second hypothesis is that the brain is organized to specific stimulus. This means neurons touching have the same orientation or color in the visual or auditory frequencies. They believe that there may be similarity in perception between adults and infants with synesthesia. They found that synesthesia does change during development but they also found that there were similarities between the perception of adults with synesthesia and average infants and young children.

Going back in previous studies, researchers Simpson, Quinn, and Ausubel (1956) looked at synesthetic children and the association of colors with tone frequencies. The study involved nine hundred and ninety-five children in grades three through six. Their methods involved having the children listen to six pure tone frequencies and to tell the researcher what color they associated with the tone frequency. “Definite pitch-hue associations were found which conform, in general, to results reported for adult participants” (Simpson, Quinn, and Ausubel, 1956, p. 2). The results showed that higher frequencies were paired more frequently with the colors yellow and green. The colors red and orange were shown to be more frequent with middle tone frequencies. Lastly, the colors more associated with lower tone frequencies were blue and violet. A limit to the study was there weren’t many associations between gender and variations between color-tone associations in the intensity of sound.
As stated previously, grapheme is the most common type of synesthesia.

We will look into research done by Asano and Yokosawa (2013) that looked learning in grapheme synesthesia. Previous research has shown that there are individual differences in grapheme synesthesia. There are still some unknown factors that determine the impact of grapheme synesthesia. Their study included seventeen Japanese grapheme synesthetes with their first language being Japanese. They were wanting to find the determinants involved in the “synesthetic color for graphemes of Hiragna, a phonetic script in the Japanese language, and the English alphabet” (Asano and Yokosawa, 2013, p. 1). The participants reported that linguistic sounds didn’t create a synesthetic experience for them. To make sure that the study was genuine, they also had six females who did not have synesthesia be the controlled

participants.
Their results showed the strongest indicator of synesthetic colors for Hiragana characters was grapheme numbers which was then followed by character sound and shape. Numbers and shapes were also significantly predicted synesthetic colors for the English alphabet whereas sounds were not significant. They think the cause for the differences in the Hiragana and English letters was the way graphemes are processed in the brain and how it develops in the participant’s development. The researchers created a new model which now takes into account the development of individuals. This model gives an explanation for the determination process of grapheme synesthesia. The model and their results from the research suggest that the way children are introduced to graphemes during development is important.
Researcher Stephan (2004) wanted to have a better understanding by comparing synesthesia and dyslexia. Dyslexia is a reading disability in which most have trouble reading because letters get switched in their brains. The study included ninety-two dyslexic and eighty-seven nondyslexic students ranging from ages seven to fourteen. There was a mix of males and females. By using a chi-square, they found that there was not a significant amount of synesthetes in the dyslexia group. Unfortunately, there was no significant relationship between dyslexia and synesthesia. Pursuing further research, they also looked at different types of synesthesia which they did by using a “Pearson product-moment correlation” (Stephan, 2004, p. 4). Out of the one hundred and seventy-nine participants, they found that twenty-nine of both genders had some form of synesthesia. The most common type of synesthesia among them was experiencing hearing and color together.