{"id":13503,"date":"2017-02-02T12:45:05","date_gmt":"2017-02-02T11:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=13503"},"modified":"2017-02-02T12:45:05","modified_gmt":"2017-02-02T11:45:05","slug":"synesthesia-and-language-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=13503","title":{"rendered":"Synesthesia and Language Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I came across an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.livescience.com\/57426-synesthesia-less-common-in-native-bilinguals.html\">interesting article<\/a> today about a possible link between synesthesia and language learning.<\/p>\n<p>The article reports a survey of students in Prague and British Columbia which found that those who learn a language or languages after reaching school age are somewhat more likely to have synesthesia than those who are bilingual from birth or a very early age.<\/p>\n<p>The article speculates that synesthesia might be a learning aid that is particularly useful for people learning &#8220;opaque&#8221; languages. That is languages with complex spelling systems, like English, and not so useful for &#8220;transparent&#8221; languages like Czech, where the links between spelling and pronunciation are much more straightforward.<\/p>\n<p>The English orthography is described as &#8220;a hot mess of weird rules, exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Do you think this is a fair description?<\/p>\n<p>Do any of you have synesthesia?<\/p>\n<p>If so, does it help with learning languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across an interesting article today about a possible link between synesthesia and language learning. The article reports a survey of students in Prague and British Columbia which found that those who learn a language or languages after reaching school age are somewhat more likely to have synesthesia than those who are bilingual from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-language-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}