COLOURED LANGUAGE

   Also known as coloured words. Both terms are used to denote a * chromatism (i.e. a hallucinated colour or coloured light) arising simultaneously with or in succession to linguistic elements. Coloured language is classified as one of the many forms of * synaesthesia. Although colour-word correspondences are idiosyncratic, intrain-dividually they tend to be quite consequential. Phenomenologically, coloured language can be either word-based (connected with the Gestalt of words), graphemic (connected with the way it is written), phonemic (connected with the way it sounds), or numeric (pertaining to numbers). Following this arrangement, coloured language can be divided into chromatic-lexical synaesthesias, chromatic-graphemic synaesthesias, chromatic-phonemic synaesthesias (i.e. *phonopsia), and chromatic-numeric synaesthesias.

   References

   Cytowic, R.E. (2002). Synesthesia. A union ofthe senses. Second edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.