Hauw Fabien, El Soudany Mohamed, Cohen Laurent
Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Sorbonne Universités, Institut du Cerveau, ICM, Paris, France; AP-HP, Hôpital de La Pitié Salpêtrière, Fédération de Neurologie, Paris, France.
Inserm U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Sorbonne Universités, Institut du Cerveau, ICM, Paris, France.
Cortex. 2023 Nov;168:226-234. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.08.011. Epub 2023 Sep 20.
As first described by Francis Galton, some persons perceive vividly and automatically in their mind's eye the written form of words that they are hearing. This phenomenon, labeled ticker-tape synesthesia (TTS), is thought to reflect an abnormally strong influence of speech processing in language areas on to orthographic representations in the visual cortex. Considering the relevance of TTS for the study of reading acquisition, we looked for objective behavioral advantages or impairments in 22 synesthetes, as compared to 22 matched control participants. In three auditory tasks relying on orthographic working memory (letters counting, backward spelling, and letter shape decision), we predicted and observed better performance in synesthetes than in controls. In two visual tasks (lexical decision and letter decision) with a concurrent auditory stimulation, we predicted that synesthetes should suffer from a larger interference by irrelevant speech than controls, but eventually found no difference between the groups. Those results, which we discuss in relation to orthographic processing, mental imagery, and working memory, promote TTS from pure subjectivity to an experimentally measurable phenomenon.
正如弗朗西斯·高尔顿首次描述的那样，有些人能在脑海中生动且自动地浮现出他们所听到单词的书写形式。这种现象被称为纸带联觉（TTS），被认为反映了语言区域中语音处理对视觉皮层中拼字表征产生的异常强烈影响。考虑到TTS与阅读习得研究的相关性，我们对比了22名联觉者和22名匹配的对照参与者，寻找他们在客观行为上的优势或缺陷。在三项依赖拼字工作记忆的听觉任务（字母计数、倒序拼写和字母形状判断）中，我们预测并观察到联觉者的表现优于对照组。在两项伴有同步听觉刺激的视觉任务（词汇判断和字母判断）中，我们预测联觉者会比对照组受到更多无关语音的干扰，但最终发现两组之间没有差异。我们结合拼字处理、心理意象和工作记忆对这些结果进行了讨论，这使得TTS从纯粹的主观性现象转变为一种可通过实验测量的现象。
