ORDINALLINGUISTIC PERSONIFICATION

(OLP)

A term used to denote a form ofsynaesthesiain which individual members of ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, days, months, and letters, are associated with personalities. Although the phenomenon itself was described as early as 1893 by the French psychologist Théodore Flournoy (1854-1920), it has attracted the interest of present-day scientific researchers. OLP should not be confused with the notion of "personification, which stands for a "compound hallucination depicting a human being.

Flournoy, T. (1893).Des phénomènes de synopsie. Paris: Félix Alcan.

Simner, J., Holenstein, E. (2007). Ordinal linguistic personification as a variant of synesthesia.Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 694703.