Commentary Synaesthesia, Color Terms, and Color Space Color Claims Came From Color Names in Beeli, Esslen, and

Grapheme-color synaesthesia is an unusual condition in which letters and digits generate involuntary experiences of color. In this article, we show that grapheme-color synaesthetes make nonrandom associations that are best described by an under-standing of color language, and that different measures of such associations converge to illustrate a nonarbitrary relationship for all people between color names and color space. We focus on a recent study (Beeli, Esslen, & Jäncke, 2007) that presented the ostensibly novel finding of a relationship between the colors that synaesthetes associate with graphemes and the frequencies of those graphemes. However, in a study published 2 years earlier (Simner et al., 2005), but not cited by Beeli et al., we had already established that grapheme fre-quencies are important. We showed that high-frequency graph-emes tend to be paired with high-frequency color names (e.g., a