Learning in colour: children with grapheme-colour synaesthesia show cognitive benefits in vocabulary and self-evaluated reading.

ABSTRACT: Cognitive benefits associated with grapheme-colour synaesthesia in adults are well documented, but far less is known about whether such benefits might arise in synaesthetes as children. One previous study on a very small group of randomly sampled child synaesthetes found cognitive benefits in short-term memory and processing speed (the ability to quickly scan an array of images and discriminate between them), but was inconclusive for a test of receptive vocabulary. Using a stratified population sample (Growing Up in Scotland Project, Edinburgh, UK: Scottish Executive, 2007), we investigated the performance of a large cohort of child grapheme-colour synaesthetes using four literacy measures taken at age 10 years. These were three verbal comprehension measures (expressive vocabulary,

SUBMITTER: Smees R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6834012 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature