j.simner AT ed.ac.uk Room: F17 Telephone: +44 (0)1331 650 3450
My research is in the area of language comprehension and production, both in the population at large, and in the inherited condition known as synaesthesia.
In the general population, I examine the planning of causes and consequences in speech and writing; the impact of local incoherence in reading and the comprehension of pronouns and other referring expressions.
My research in synaesthesia focuses again on linguistic issues. Synaesthesia is an inherited condition in which ordinary activities trigger extra-ordinary experiences. For example, colours may be perceived from sounds, or shapes experienced from tastes. Synaesthesia can cause a direct crossing of the senses, or be mediated by higher level processing, such as language. For instance, printed or spoken words can induce a sensation of taste in the mouth (lexical-gustatory synaesthesia) or an visual impression of colour (lexical-chromatic synaesthesia). The aim of my research is to examine the cognitive, linguistic, and developmental basis of synaesthesia, and what the condition might tell us about the functioning of memory and language more generally.
Publications
Simner, J., & Ward, J. (in press). The taste of words on the tip of the tongue. Nature.
Simner, J. (in press). Beyond perception: Synaesthesia as a psycholinguistic phenomenon. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Simner, J., & Holenstein, E. (in press). Ordinal linguistic personification: The systematic attribution of animate qualities to the linguistic units of ordinal sequences. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Simner, J., & Hubbard, E.M. (in press). Variants of synaesthesia interact in cognitive tasks: Evidence for implicit associations and late connectivity in cross-talk theories. Neuroscience.
Simner, J., & Glover, L., & Mowat, A. (2006). Linguistic determinants of word colouring in grapheme-colour synaesthesia. Cortex, 42(2), 281-289.
Sagiv, N., Simner, J., Collins, J., & Butterworth, B., & Ward, J. (2006). What is the relationship between Synaesthesia and Visuo-spatial Number Forms? Cognition, 101(1), 114-128.
Simner, J., Ward, J., Mulvenna C., Sagiv N., Tsakanikos E., Witherby S.A., Fraser C., Scott K. (2006). The prevalence and male: female ratio of synaesthesia. Perception, 35(8), 1024-1033.
Simner, J., Ward, J., Lanz, M., Jansari, A., Noonan, K., Glover, L., & Oakley, D. (2005). Non-Random Associations of Graphemes to Colours in Synaesthetic and Normal Populations. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22(8), 1069-1085.
Ward, J., & Simner, J. (2005). Is synaesthesia an X-linked dominant trait with lethality in males? Perception, 34(5), 611-623.
Simner, J., & Pickering, M. (2005). Planning causes and consequences in discourse. Journal of Memory & Language, 52 (2), 226-239.
Simner, J. (2005). Review of Sagiv & Robertson's "Synesthesia: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience". Perception, 34(10), 1293-1294.
Ward, J., & Simner, J., & Auyueng, V. (2005). A comparison of lexical-gustatory and grapheme-colour synaesthesia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22 (1), 28–41.
Sagiv, N., Mulvenna, C., Tsakanikos, E., Witherby, A., Collins, J. Simner, J., & Ward, J. (2005). How common is synesthesia? New pervalence studies and some clues concerning its cognitive, neural and genetic basis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 83-83 Suppl S.
Ward, J., & Simner, J. (2003). Lexical-Gustatory Synaesthesia: Linguistic and Conceptual Factors. Cognition, 89(3), 237-261.
Simner, J., Garnham, A., & Pickering, M. (2003). Discourse Cues to Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from 'do it' Comprehension. Discourse Processes, 36(1), 1-17.
Simner, J., Smyth, R. (1999). Phonological activation in anaphoric lexical access (ALA). Brain & Language, 68, 40-45.
Conferences
Simner, J. Language and Development in Synaesthesia. Invited paper presented at the ICN special seminar series, UCL, London. May 2006.
Simner, J. Synaesthetic sensation is induced in tip-of-tongue states. Paper presented at the 2nd Annual Meeting of the UK Synaesthesia Association. March 2006
Simner, J. The prevalence and male-female distribution of synaesthesia. Paper presented at the XIVth Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Leiden. 2005.
Simner, J. Associating colours to letters: What is a typical synaesthetic association? Paper presented at the 1st International Conference on Synaesthesia and the Synaesthetic Arts, University of Granada, Spain. July 2005.
Simner, J. et al. The Prevalence and Female:Male Distribution of Synaesthesia Annual General Meeting and Conference of the UK Synaesthesia Association. March 2005
Simner, J. What synaesthesia can tell us about language processing. Proceedings of AMLaP 2004, Aix-en-Provence, France. 2004
Simner, J., Pickering, M.J. Generating associations of cause and consequence. Proceedings of the 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Maryland, VR. 2004.
Simner, J., & Pickering, M.J. Anticipating cause and consequence during text comprehension. Proceedings of AMLaP 2003, Glasgow, UK. 2003
Simner, J., Garnham, A. On- and off-line processing of ‘do it’ coreference. Proceedings of the 16th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, MIT, Cambridge, MA. 2003.
Ward, J., & Simner, J. Developmental neuropsychology of synaesthesia: The differing roles of nature & nurture. Proceedings of the BNS. National Hospital, London. 2003.
Simner, J., Garnham, A., & Pickering, M. Discourse biases in ambiguity resolution. Proceedings of AMLaP 2002, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. 2002
Ward, J. and Simner, J. Phoneme-taste synaesthesia: Linguistic and conceptual factors. Proceedings of the Experimental Psychology Society Meeting; Cambridge. 2002.
Simner, J., & Garnham, A. Noun or verb? Processing 'do it' anaphora. Proceedings of the BPS Cognitive Section XVII Annual Conference, University of Essex, UK. 2000.
Simner, J., & Garnham, A. Cross-category checks in anaphor comprehension. Proceedings of the BPS Cognitive Section XVI Annual Conference, University of York, UK. 1999.
Simner, J., Smyth, R. Does lexical access take place during anaphor comprehension? Proceedings of the 11th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, NJ. 1998.
Simner, J., Smyth, R. Anaphoric vs. Stimulus-Based Lexical Access. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Edmonton, Canada. 1998.
Public dissemination of research findings
- BBC News (24/3/5: Why Some See Colours in Numbers)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4375977.stm)
- BBC News & Health (5/2/6: Synaesthesia)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/conditions/synaesthesia1.shtml)
- BBC Radio Scotland (18/3/6, 8.30pm; VIP on-air/Synaesthesia)
- Hellenic Radio News (28/3/5: Discover Synaesthesia: the Colour of Letters)
http://www.hri.org/news/greek/eraen/2005/05-03-28_1.eraen.html
- Glasgow Sunday Post (29/5/5: What Colours do you See in this Headline?)
- BBC documentary/Child of our Time (5/2/6: Recipe for success/ What is Synaesthesia?)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/parenting/tv_and_radio/child_of_our_time/progguide_series6prog4.shtml, Follow 'What is synaesthesia?')
- New York Daily News (26/6/6; Kaleidescope Eyes: Blended Senses Colourful not Rare)
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/429870p-362299c.html
- ABC News (forthcoming; producer Maria Spinella)
Grants and awards
2005 Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship: Psycholinguistic investigations of linguistic synaesthesias.
2002-05 British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship: The effect of co-reference on memory representations
2002 ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship
2002-3 British Academy Small Grant: Co-reference and memory
2003-05 University of Edinburgh Developmental Trust Awards (3)
