While copying some text and numbers from a printed page into a Word document (and getting a few of the words and numbers mixed up along the way), it made me think about dyslexia in relation to synesthesia.
I don’t have dyslexia myself (I think my brain was just refusing to work today) but I wonder if there are any synaesthetes – I’m talking about grapheme-colour synaesthetes mainly – who are also dyslexic. There must be some out there, and if so, how do they experience colours in response to letters and words? Is there a difference compared to how a non-dyslexic synaesthesia would see them?
According to Dyslexia Action, Dyslexic people usually find it difficult to analyse and work with the sounds of spoken words, and many have difficulties with short-term memory, sequencing and organisation. This means that it is more difficult for them to learn how spoken sounds map onto letters, which affects the ability to spell and the ability to decode or ‘sound out’ words.
If synaesthesia is combined with dyslexia, does it make it even harder to process language? Do the colours conflict with the letters in the words? Or alternatively, can the synaesthesia help with spelling?
These are questions I’ll never find the answers to unless I can find a dyslexic synaesthete, but I thought I’d write down my thoughts on it anyway.
Posted by LS 
Posted by LS 
