Linguistic Synesthesia

The Sensory Spectrum: Challenging the Hierarchy of Linguistic Synesthesia

Linguistic synesthesias blend senses, like the “smooth melody” where touch evokes sound. For almost a century, research has suggested a sensory hierarchy, mapping touch, taste, and smell onto sound and sight. This book presents the first meta-analysis of linguistic synesthesias, combining thirty-eight datasets from fourteen languages to test this idea. The authors reveal distinct patterns in the data. However,…