Where Differences are Strengths and Every Child Belongs
DYSLEXIA WHISPERERS®: Specialists in Identifying, Supporting and Celebrating Learning Differences. Dyslexia Re-Routed! The Centre that Screens Three Year Olds!
Real-World Solutions Designed with Neurodivergent Thinking
Drawing on her unique conceptual synaesthesia, Miss Emma (the Neurodivergent Reading Whisperer®) provides a new lens through which to understand the relationship between speech sounds and ‘sound pics’ (graphemes). Her work reshapes how these connections are represented and transforms how children and adults learn to read, spell, and communicate. Phonemies® are understood by toddlers and can be used to support speech and language development in ways that facilitate self-teaching without explicit and systematic phonics instruction. This gives rise to a new theory: the Speech Sound Mapping Theory.
What is Conceptual Synaesthesia
Conceptual synaesthesia is a neurocognitive phenomenon in which sounds, words, or ideas evoke vivid internal imagery. It is related to perceptual synaesthesia, where one sensory input (such as sound) automatically triggers a perceptual experience in another sense (such as colour), but conceptual synaesthesia operates primarily within higher-level linguistic and associative networks in the brain.
In Emma Hartnell-Baker’s case, the speech sounds themselves act as the trigger.
When she hears spoken language, each phoneme evokes a distinct, consistent image in her mind’s eye. These mental images are not seen in the external world but are internally visualised with high stability and detail. Neuroscientifically, this experience may reflect cross-activation between auditory and visual association areas, involving the superior temporal gyrus (which processes speech sounds), the occipital cortex (involved in visual imagery), and multimodal integration hubs such as the angular gyrus.
This rare way of processing sound enables Emma to perceive the structure of spoken language visually. Over time, she externalised these inner visualisations as Phonemies®, a system that makes speech sounds visible and linkable to their written forms. This process reveals how the brain’s capacity for cross-modal mapping can support language learning, literacy, and rehabilitation.
The insight gained from this experience forms the foundation of the Speech Sound Mapping Theory, which proposes that by making the mapping between speech, print, and meaning visible, learners can reach the self-teaching phase of reading and spelling more intuitively and independently.
While in Australia, Miss Emma encouraged teachers to focus on how speech sounds connect to their visual representations, known as sound pics (graphemes). Children were invited to take “pictures” of the speech sounds they could hear in the air using Speech Sound Cameras, moving from left to right. Using Duck Hands® helped them see the sounds in sequence before blending them into a word.
On paper, these sounds were represented with Speech Sound Lines and Numbers. As children wrote the numbers, they said the corresponding sounds aloud. They then placed the Speech Sound Monsters (Phonemies®) onto the lines and asked, “Which are the pictures of the speech sounds in this word?” This directly addresses the issues relating to an opaque orthography, with choices shown in the Speech Sound Clouds®.
This multisensory process forms the foundation of the Speech Sound Pics® Approach, which begins with the Speech Sound Play Plan, a phase designed to build phonemic awareness and prepare children to connect spoken and written language naturally and joyfully.
