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January 9, 2017
People with synesthesia experience the sensory world in a unique way —
for example, they "taste" words or "hear" colors. Now, new research
suggests that people who learn a second language but aren't exposed to
that second language very early in life are more likely to have this
sensory-switching ability than those who are natively bilingual.
"Groups of people with different linguistic backgrounds have different rates of synesthesia
— and quite different rates," said study co-author Marcus Watson, an
experimental psychologist at York University in Toronto. "It ranges from
0 percent to about 5 percent depending on what their language
background is."
The findings bolster a theory that synesthesia — the bizarre brain phenomenon
in which one sensory or cognitive experience is automatically triggered
by another — may develop to improve learning in complicated,
ruled-based tasks such as mastering reading, music theory and time
telling. Live Science
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