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Journal Article

Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages

MPS-Authors
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Majid,  Asifa
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, External Organizations;
Research Associates, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Roberts,  Sean G.
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Cilissen,  Ludy
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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De Sousa,  Hilário
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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De Vos,  Connie
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Senft,  Gunter
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Tufvesson,  Sylvia
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Dingemanse,  Mark
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Multimodal Language and Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, External Organizations;

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Brown,  Penelope
Other Research, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Hill,  Clair
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Levinson,  Stephen C.
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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All data, processing code and analysis scripts are available in an online GitHub repository
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pnas.1720419115.sapp.pdf
(Supplementary material), 3MB

Citation

Majid, A., Roberts, S. G., Cilissen, L., Emmorey, K., Nicodemus, B., O'Grady, L., et al. (2018). Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(45), 11369-11376. doi:10.1073/pnas.1720419115.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0002-6E73-2
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 systematically, and how they do so. The tendency for better coding in some domains can be explained in part by cultural preoccupations. Although languages seem free to elaborate specific sensory domains, some general tendencies emerge: for example, with some exceptions, smell is poorly coded. The surprise is that, despite the gradual phylogenetic accumulation of the senses, and the imbalances in the neural tissue dedicated to them, no single hierarchy of the senses imposes itself upon language.