# Synesthesia Color Chart for Letters

**URL:** <https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/synesthesia-color-chart-for-letters/30481>\
**Category:** Neuroscience, Psychology, and Health\
**Tags:** synesthesia\
**Created:** [March 26, 2015, 5:13am UTC](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/synesthesia-color-chart-for-letters/30481 "2015-03-26T05:13:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Josh](https://forum.artofmemory.com/user_avatar/forum.artofmemory.com/josh/32/21_2.png) [@Josh](https://forum.artofmemory.com/u/Josh)\
**Post date:** [March 26, 2015, 5:13am UTC](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/synesthesia-color-chart-for-letters/30481/1 "2015-03-26T05:13:29Z")

</div>

[“A” Is Red, “I” Is White, “X” Is Black – Um, Why?](http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-is-red-i-is-white-x-is-black-um-why.html)

> Check out this graph of the color associations for different letters for people with grapheme-color synesthesia. This is from a sample of 6588 synesthetes in the US, reported in Witthoft, Winawer, and Eagleman 2015. Presumably, they're not talking to each other. But there's a pretty good agreement that "A" is red, "X" is black, and "Y" is yellow. But you knew that already, right?

[![Synesthesia letter chart](https://forum.artofmemory.com/uploads/default/original/3X/4/e/4e59001b2da799fdffc043a96c0a5a1c9cb6a06d.png)](https://artofmemory.com/files/forum/6377/synesthesia-chart-journalpone0118996g001-cc.png)

(Image used under [Creative Commons license](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) via [this page](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118996).)

[Prevalence of Learned Grapheme-Color Pairings in a Large Online Sample of Synesthetes](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118996)

> In this paper we estimate the minimum prevalence of grapheme-color synesthetes with letter-color matches learned from an external stimulus, by analyzing a large sample of English-speaking grapheme-color synesthetes. We find that at least 6% (400/6588 participants) of the total sample learned many of their matches from a widely available colored letter toy. Among those born in the decade after the toy began to be manufactured, the proportion of synesthetes with learned letter-color pairings approaches 15% for some 5-year periods. Among those born 5 years or more before it was manufactured, none have colors learned from the toy. Analysis of the letter-color matching data suggests the only difference between synesthetes with matches to the toy and those without is exposure to the stimulus. These data indicate learning of letter-color pairings from external contingencies can occur in a substantial fraction of synesthetes, and are consistent with the hypothesis that grapheme-color synesthesia is a kind of conditioned mental imagery.
