For a lexical-gustatory synesthete, hearing or reading a word floods the mouth with a specific taste: the name Derek might be earwax, jail might be bacon. The pairings sound comical and are entirely real, consistent across decades of retesting.
The documented cases show tastes anchoring to phonemes, the sound units inside words, rather than meanings. Words sharing sounds share flavors, which is a clean clue about where in language processing the crossover happens.
This form is rare even by synesthesia standards, which makes the handful of long-term case studies disproportionately valuable to researchers.