Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 1, 2026

Training Synesthetic Letter-color Associations by Reading in Color
Published on: February 20, 2014
Synesthetic colors are elicited by sound quality in Japanese synesthetes
Michiko Asano1, Kazuhiko Yokosawa
1Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan. asano@L.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Abstract:
Determinants of synesthetic color choice for Japanese phonetic characters were studied in six Japanese synesthetes. The study used Hiragana and Katakana characters, which represent the same set of syllables although their visual forms are dissimilar. From a palette of 138 colors, synesthetes selected a color corresponding to each character. Results revealed that synesthetic color choices for Hiragana characters and those for their Katakana counterparts were remarkably consistent, indicating that color selection depended on character-related sounds and not visual form. This Hiragana-Katakana invariance cannot be regarded as the same phenomenon as letter case invariance, usually reported for English grapheme-color synesthesia, because Hiragana and Katakana characters have different identities whereas upper and lower case letters have the same identity. This involvement of phonology suggests that cross-activation between an inducer (i.e., letter/character) brain region and that of the concurrent (i.e., color) area in grapheme-color synesthesia is mediated by higher order cortical processing areas.
Related Concept Videos
Synesthesia
Auditory Perception
Perception of Sound Waves
The pitch of a sound depends on the frequency and the pressure amplitude of the source. Two sounds of the same frequency...
Sensory Modalities
General senses refer to the broad category of sensory information detected by receptors in the body and can be further grouped into somatic and visceral senses. Somatic sensations include touch, pressure, temperature, and pain and are essential for navigating our environment and...
Hearing
Perceiving Loudness, Pitch, and Location
Place theory, or place coding, suggests that different pitches are heard because various sound waves activate specific locations along the cochlea's basilar membrane. The brain determines the pitch of a sound by identifying...
