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Differential coding of perception in the world's languages.

Asifa Majid1,2, Seán G Roberts3, Ludy Cilissen4

  • 1Language & Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands; asifa.majid@york.ac.uk stephen.levinson@mpi.nl.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|November 7, 2018
PubMed

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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

This study investigated a universal hierarchy of senses across 20 languages. Findings reveal significant linguistic variation in sensory domain coding, challenging presumed hierarchies and highlighting cultural influences.

Area of Science:

  • Linguistic Anthropology
  • Cognitive Science
  • Sensory Perception

Background:

  • Western thought presumes a hierarchy of senses, prioritizing vision and audition over touch, taste, and smell.
  • This presumed hierarchy suggests easier linguistic description and communication for vision and audition.
  • Previous research, primarily in Indo-European languages, supported this hierarchy.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test the universality of a sensory hierarchy across diverse languages.
  • To investigate how different languages linguistically code sensory experiences.
  • To explore the influence of cultural factors on sensory language.

Main Methods:

  • Elicited descriptions of stimuli from the five basic senses.
  • Analyzed linguistic coding of sensory domains in 20 diverse languages, including sign languages.
Keywords:
cross-culturalcross-linguisticineffabilitylanguageperception

Related Experiment Videos

  • Compared patterns of sensory language across different linguistic and cultural groups.

    • Main Results:

    • Languages exhibit fundamental differences in which sensory domains are systematically coded.
    • Cultural preoccupations partially explain domain-specific coding tendencies.
    • Smell is generally poorly coded across languages, with some exceptions.
    • No single, universal hierarchy of senses emerged across all languages studied.

    Conclusions:

    • Linguistic coding of senses is not universally hierarchical, contrary to Western assumptions.
    • Language diversity reveals significant flexibility in representing sensory experiences.
    • Cultural factors play a role, but do not dictate a fixed sensory hierarchy in language.