Associating colours with people: a case of chromatic-lexical synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia is a condition in which a sensory experience normally associated with one modality occurs when another modality is stimulated (Baron-Cohen and Harrison 1997). The commonest form of synaesthesia is colour-word synaesthesia, which is subdivided into a chromatic-graphemic type (the dominant letter in a word induces a letter-specific colour experience) and a chromatic-lexical type (each word triggers a specific colour experience) (BaronCohen and Harrison 1997). To date, little is known about the neural mechanisms associated with synaesthesia (Grossenbacher and Lovelace 2001, Paulesu et al., 1995). Here, we report the case of R.S. with chromatic-lexical synaesthesia for names of personally familiar people. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of such a form of synaesthesia. Functional imaging (fMRI) was used to elucidate the neural basis of this form of chromatic-lexical synaesthesia and the interaction of synaesthetic colour experience with the non-synaesthetic perception of external colour.