Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages

Multiple social science disciplines have converged on the senses in recent years, where formerly the domain of perception was the preserve of psychology. Linguistics, or Language, however, seems to have an ambivalent role in this undertaking. On the one hand, Language with a capital L (language as a general human capacity) is part of the problem. It was the prior focus on language (text) that led to the disregard of the senses. On the other hand, it is language (with a small “l,” a particular tongue) that offers key insights into how other peoples conceptualize the senses. In this article, we argue that a systematic cross-cultural approach can reveal fundamental truths about the precise connections between language and the senses. Recurring failures to adequately describe the sensorium across specific languages reveal the intrinsic limits of Language. But the converse does not hold. Failures of expressibility in one language need not hold any implications for the Language faculty per se, and indeed can enlighten us about the possible experiential worlds available to human experience.

While activations of sensorial experiences are considered to be of crucial importance for symbolization involving high-order cognitive processes (Oakley 2009:125), they are also part and parcel of our daily experiences, including language. For instance, the knowledge and skills of architects, perfume makers, potters, piano tuners, chocolatiers or oenologists require that they are 'tuned' to various sense modalities and sensory literacies-from single sense modalities to multiple ones. Even such mundane tasks as choosing a particular brand of toothpaste, soap, clothes or stationary, booking a table at a restaurant, or downloading mobile ring signals reflect our inclinations towards certain colours, smells, textures, tastes or sounds, and our decisions are the result of-conscious or unconscious-operations involving several senses. In other words, we are born synaesthetes, i.e. intrinsically cross-sensory beings, even if cultural factors often shape our sensory literacy in fundamental ways.

Functions of Language, 2015

This article has two aims: (i) to give an overview of research on sensory perceptions in different disciplines with different aims, and on the basis of that (ii) to encourage new research based on a balanced socio-sensory-cognitive approach. It emphasizes the need to study sensory meanings in human communication, both in Language with a capital L, focusing on universal phenomena, and across different languages, and within Culture with a capital C, such as parts of the world and political regions, and across different cultures, such as markets, production areas and aesthetic activities, in order to stimulate work resulting in more sophisticated, theoretically informed analyses of language use in general, and meaning-making of sensory perceptions in particular. Keywords: semantics, discourse, evidentiality, conceptual preference hierarchy, socio-sensory-cognitive triad, metaphor, metonymy, vision, sight, smell, taste, touch, texture, olfactory, gustatory.

Converging evidence in language and communication research, 2019

Chapter 1. Sensory linguistics 1.1. Introduction Humans live in a perceptual world. All of humanity's accomplishments, from agriculture to space travel, depend on us being able to interact with the world through seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, and smelling. Everything we do, everything we feel, everything we know, is mediated through the senses. Because the senses are so important to us, it is not surprising that all languages have resources for talking about the content of sensory perception. Miller and Johnson-Laird (1976, p. 3) remind us that "word-percept associations are fundamental" to language. Rakova (2003, p. 34) says that we do not have words "just because it is nice for us to have them," but because they are "devices that connect us to the external world." In fact, without the ability to express perceptual content, language would be useless. "Sensory linguistics" is the study of how language relates to the senses. It addresses such fundamental questions as: How are sensory perceptions packaged into words? Which perceptual qualities are easier to talk about than others? How do languages differ in how perception is encoded? And how do words relate to the underlying perceptual systems in the brain? The time is ripe for bringing these questions and many others together. Research into the connection between language and perception has a long tradition in the language sciences. Among other things, researchers have looked at how many words there are for particular sensory modalities (e.g., Viberg, 1983), how frequently particular sensory perceptions are talked about (e.g., San

2019

Humans live in a perceptual world. All of humanity's accomplishments, from agriculture to space travel, depend on us being able to interact with the world through seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, and smelling. Everything we do, everything we feel, everything we know, is mediated through the senses. Because the senses are so important to us, it is not surprising that all languages have resources for talking about the content of sensory perception. Miller and Johnson-Laird (1976, p. 3) remind us that "word-percept associations are fundamental" to language. Rakova (2003, p. 34) says that we do not have words "just because it is nice for us to have them," but because they are "devices that connect us to the external world." In fact, without the ability to express perceptual content, language would be useless. "Sensory linguistics" is the study of how language relates to the senses. It addresses such fundamental questions as: How are sensory perceptions packaged into words? Which perceptual qualities are easier to talk about than others? How do languages differ in how perception is encoded? And how do words relate to the underlying perceptual systems in the brain? The time is ripe for bringing these questions and many others together. Research into the connection between language and perception has a long tradition in the language sciences. Among other things, researchers have looked at how many words there are for particular sensory modalities (e.g., Viberg, 1983), how frequently particular sensory perceptions are talked about (e.g., San

Grounded theories hold sensorimotor activation is critical to language processing. Such theories have focused predominantly on the dominant senses of sight and hearing. Relatively fewer studies have assessed mental simulation within touch, taste, and smell, even though they are critically implicated in communication for important domains, such as health and wellbeing. We review work that sheds light on whether perceptual activation from lesser studied modalities contribute to meaning in language. We critically evaluate data from behavioural, imaging, and cross-cultural studies. We conclude that evidence for sensorimotor simulation in touch, taste, and smell is weak. Comprehending language related to these senses may instead rely on simulation of emotion, as well as crossmodal simulation of the "higher" senses of vision and audition. Overall, the data suggest the need for a refinement of embodiment theories, as not all sensory modalities provide equally strong evidence for mental simulation.

2008

This website and the materials herewith supplied have been developed by members of the Language and Cognition Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (formerly the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group). In a number of cases materials were designed in collaboration with staff from other MPI departments. Proper citation and attribution Any use of the materials should be acknowledged in publications, presentations and other public materials. Entries have been developed by different individuals. Please cite authors as indicated on the webpage and front page of the pdf entry. Use of associated stimuli should also be cited by acknowledging the field manual entry. Intellectual property rights are hereby asserted. Creative Commons license This material is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This means you are free to share (copy, redistribute) the material in any medium or format, and you are free to adapt (remix, transform, build upon) the material, under the following terms: you must give appropriate credit in the form of a citation to the original material; you may not use the material for commercial purposes; and if you adapt the material, you must distribute your contribution under the same license as the original. Background The field manuals were originally intended as working documents for internal use only. They were supplemented by verbal instructions and additional guidelines in many cases. If you have questions about using the materials, or comments on the viability in various field situations, feel free to get in touch with the authors.

Les Signes du Monde: Interculturalité et Globalisation, Actas del VIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Estudios Semióticos, Lyon, Francia, 2004, 2007

“The ‘globalization’ of the senses: transpositions between vision, audition, taste, smell and touch”. En: Les Signes du Monde: Interculturalité et Globalisation, Actas del VIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Estudios Semióticos, Lyon, Francia, 2004. Publicadas en 2007, 11 págs.

Lingua, 2018

Being able to talk about what humans perceive with their senses is one of the fundamental capacities of language. But how do languages encode perceptual information? In this paper, we analyze how experiences from different senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) are encoded differentially across lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives) in the English language. Three independently collected lists of perception-related words show that sound concepts are more prone to being expressed as verbs. Data from an independent rating study furthermore shows that nouns rated to strongly relate to motion are also rated to strongly relate to sound, more so than is the case for color-related nouns. We argue that the association of verbs with sound is due to sound concepts being inherently more dynamic, motionrelated and event-based, in contrast to other sensory perceptions which are phenomenologically less strongly associated with motion and change. Overall, our results are the first to show differential encoding of perception-related concepts across different types of lexical categories. Our analyses of lexical patterns provide empirical evidence for the interconnection of semantics and grammar.

Following previous works (Sweetser 1990; Evans & Wilkins 2000) on the semantic extensions of verbs expressing sensory modalities and prehension to other semantic domains, this study investigates the semantic associations between vision, hearing, prehension, and mental perception in a sample of 25 languages belonging to 8 phyla. The study, based on first hand data, combines synchronic and diachronic analyses. It shows that, although vision prevails in the hierarchy of physical senses (Viberg 1984), the auditory modality prevails crosslinguistically as far as transfield associations between the hearing sense and mental perception are concerned. Vision comes next, then prehension. Furthermore the data invalidates the assumption that literacy might privilege sight as opposed to hearing in this respect, as a lexical universal.