Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages
Gunter SenftProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. This predicts that humans ought to be better at communicating about sight and hearing than the other senses, and decades of work based on English and related languages certainly suggests this is true. However, how well does this reflect the diversity of languages and communities worldwide? To test whether there is a universal hierarchy of the senses, stimuli from the five basic senses were used to elicit descriptions in 20 diverse languages, including 3 unrelated sign languages. We found that languages differ fundamentally in which sensory domains they linguistically code sys...
Related papers
The senses in language and culture
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.
Sensory perceptions in language and cognition
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.
Making sense of sensory perceptions across languages and cultures
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.
Sensory Linguistics
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
Sensory Linguistics: Language, perception and metaphor
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
Grounding language in the neglected senses of touch, taste, and smell Grounding language in the neglected senses of touch, taste, and smell
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.
Language of perception: Views from anthropology
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.
The "globalization" of the senses: transpositions between vision, audition, taste, smell and touch (2007)
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.
Sensory language across lexical categories
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.
2008. Semantic associations between sensory modalities, prehension and mental perceptions: A cross-linguistic perspective
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.
The semantic structure of sensory vocabulary in an African language
The widespread occurrence of ideophones, large classes of words specialized in evoking sensory imagery, is little known outside linguistics and anthropology. Ideophones are a common feature in many of the world’s languages but are underdeveloped in English and other Indo-European languages. Here we study the meanings of ideophones in Siwu (a Kwa language from Ghana) using a pile-sorting task. The goal was to uncover the underlying structure of the lexical space and to examine the claimed link between ideophones and perception. We found that Siwu ideophones are principally organized around fine-grained aspects of sensory perception, and map onto salient psychophysical dimensions identified in sensory science. The results ratify ideophones as dedicated sensory vocabulary and underline the relevance of ideophones for research on language and perception.
Taste and sight
Jezikoslovlje
Embodiment is central to the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise. The grounding of language in body experience is one of the major tenets of linguistic description at various levels of analysis. We receive the infor-mation of the world around us through the bodily sensations; i.e. we per-ceive, then process and conceptualize it. Research into the sensory do-mains has continued to elicit further examination of how we use meta-phoric and metonymic cross-modal conceptualization in language. Inves-tigation has been carried out both on the single sense domains of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight, but also on cross-modality or synesthetic phenomena. Linguistic transfer between various senses seems to respect a hierarchy from the lower (touch, taste, smell) to the higher senses (hear-ing and sight), even though some variation of this hierarchy has been noted. The present study is the first part of a two-fold analysis of cross-modal linguistic mappings that exist between the senses of t...
Perceptual Information of “An Entirely Different Order”: The “Cultural Environment” inThe Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems
Ecological Psychology, 2017
James Gibson's final book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979/1986) may have had the unintended effect of overshadowing his prior, seminal work, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966). This circumstance is unfortunate because in many ways the final book has a narrower focus. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems not only considers other perceptual systems in addition to vision but also it is in this work where Gibson most fully lays out his ecological approach to psychology. In doing so, the book gives more explicit attention to human evolution and sociocultural processes than do his other writings. Although Gibson establishes a framework for considering perception-action commonalities across species, he also examines some of the ways in which perceiving among human and nonhuman animals differ. Among those issues examined are how tool use in the production of pictures and representations has contributed to cultural change, how language can affect perceiving, and how social structures are perceived. The ongoing debate over the conceptual status of affordances is reexamined from the point of view of sociohistorical processes.
1 Linguistic Expression of Perception and Cognition: A Typological Glimpse
BRILL eBooks, 2013
Every language has a way of talking about seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. In about a quarter of the world's languages, grammatical evidentials express means of perception (visual, and non-visual) and information source in general. Lexical verbs covering perception and cognitive processes may or may not form a special subclass of verbs. Their meanings vary. In some languages verbs of vision subsume cognitive meanings (knowledge and understanding). In others, cognition is associated with a verb of auditory perception, touch, or smell. Grammatical, and lexical, expression of perception and cognition share a number of features. 'Vision' is not the universally preferred means of perception. In numerous cultures, taboos are associated with forbidden visual experience. Vision may be considered intrusive and aggressive, and linked with access to power. In contrast, 'hearing' and 'listening' are the main avenues for learning, understanding and 'knowing'. The studies presented in this book set out to explore how these meanings and concepts are expressed in languages of Africa, Oceania, and South America. The final section of this chapter offers an overview of the volume.
Sensory Perceptions in Language, Embodiment and Epistemology
Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 2018
Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics (SAPERE) publishes new developments and advances in all the fields of philosophy, epistemology, and ethics, bringing them together with a cluster of scientific disciplines and technological outcomes: from computer science to life sciences, from economics, law, and education to engineering, logic, and mathematics, from medicine to physics, human sciences, and politics. It aims at covering all the challenging philosophical and ethical themes of contemporary society, making them appropriately applicable to contemporary theoretical, methodological, and practical problems, impasses, controversies, and conflicts. The series includes monographs, lecture notes, selected contributions from specialized conferences and workshops as well as selected Ph.D. theses.
Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies
To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different cultures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, suggesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the relative frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural relativity was conspicuous as exemplified by the high ranking of smell in Semai, an Aslian language. Together these results suggest a place for both universal constraints and cultural shaping of the language of perception.
Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2014
Our understanding of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language has traditionally been firmly based on spoken Indo-European languages and on language studied as speech or text. However, in face-to-face communication, language is multimodal: speech signals are invariably accompanied by visual information on the face and in manual gestures, and sign languages deploy multiple channels (hands, face and body) in utterance construction. Moreover, the narrow focus on spoken Indo-European languages has entrenched the assumption that language is comprised wholly by an arbitrary system of symbols and rules. However, iconicity (i.e. resemblance between aspects of communicative form and meaning) is also present: speakers use iconic gestures when they speak; many non-Indo-European spoken languages exhibit a substantial amount of iconicity in word forms and, finally, iconicity is the norm, rather than the exception in sign languages. This introduction provides the motivation for taking a ...
How can olfactory studies inform theories of language and perception
We live in a loud and colourful world, with our visual and auditory systems bombarded with
Cognitive Linguistics 2015; 26(1): 31 – 60
2016
Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies Abstract: To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experi-ence and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoc-cupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual lan-guage by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different cul-tures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, sug-gesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the rela-tive frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.