Sinestesias linguísticas: evidências empíricas e modelagens teóricas

Abstract

This thesis presents an investigation in experimental psycholinguistics into the relationships between synesthesia, language, and learning. Synesthesia is defined as a non-pathological neurological condition characterized by automatic associations between inducing stimuli (such as letters and sounds) and concurrent experiences (such as colors and tastes) (Simner et al., 2007). Although conceptual research on synesthesia has expanded in recent years, studies examining this phenomenon from the perspective of learning remain limited. The main goal of this thesis is to identify experimental evidence of the effects of synesthesia on linguistic production and, on this basis, to propose theoretical and methodological articulations between synesthesia, learning, and language, grounded in theories of learning, development, and lexical access (Watson et al., 2014; Vygotsky, 1991; Huth et al., 2016) and in empirical studies that induce synesthetic experiences in non-synesthetic individuals (e.g., Andreev, Moskvoretsky, Gorin, & Zinchenko, 2023; Sasaki & Watanabe, 2024). To this end, the research was organized into four axes: (i) original analyses of data from synesthetes and non-synesthetes collected by Souza (2020), including semantic recall tests and standardized questionnaires; (ii) a study on color-vowel pairings in non-synesthetes, based on exploratory analyses of the Synesthesia Battery and a new experiment conducted for this thesis; (iii) a study on Lexical Complexity, involving the exploration of textual productions by synesthetes and the proposal and empirical investigation of the concept of Lexical Complexity (CL), through an experiment conducted in this thesis comparing synesthetes and non-synesthetes in image description tasks; and (iv) the proposal of theoretical models addressing synesthesia and learning. The combined results indicate that synesthetes tend to assign a greater number of colors to abstract words than to concrete words; that individuals without synesthesia do not exhibit consistent vowel–color associations, with the exception of the vowel A, which is frequently associated with the color red; and that synesthesia may modulate specific linguistic dimensions of Lexical Complexity. Overall, these findings support the hypothesis that multisensory experiences inspired by synesthesia can facilitate the teaching and learning of complex content.