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Article Dans Une Revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Année : 2018

Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages

Asifa Majid
  • Fonction : Auteur
Seán Roberts
Ludy Cilissen
  • Fonction : Auteur
Karen Emmorey
  • Fonction : Auteur
Brenda Nicodemus
  • Fonction : Auteur
Lucinda O’grady
  • Fonction : Auteur
Barbara Le Lan
  • Fonction : Auteur
  • PersonId : 1234602
  • IdRef : 127821538
Hilário de Sousa
  • Fonction : Auteur
Brian Cansler
  • Fonction : Auteur
Shakila Shayan
  • Fonction : Auteur
Connie de Vos
  • Fonction : Auteur
Gunter Senft
  • Fonction : Auteur
N. Enfield
  • Fonction : Auteur
Rogayah Razak
  • Fonction : Auteur
Sylvia Tufvesson
  • Fonction : Auteur
Mark Dingemanse
  • Fonction : Auteur
Ozge Ozturk
  • Fonction : Auteur
Penelope Brown
  • Fonction : Auteur
Clair Hill
  • Fonction : Auteur
Olivier Le Guen
  • Fonction : Auteur
Rik van Gijn
  • Fonction : Auteur
Mark Sicoli
  • Fonction : Auteur
Stephen Levinson
  • Fonction : Auteur

Résumé

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.

Dates et versions

hal-04016958 , version 1 (06-03-2023)

Licence

Paternité - Pas d'utilisation commerciale - Pas de modification

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Citer

Asifa Majid, Seán Roberts, Ludy Cilissen, Karen Emmorey, Brenda Nicodemus, et al.. Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018, 115 (45), pp.11369-11376. ⟨10.1073/pnas.1720419115⟩. ⟨hal-04016958⟩
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