Language statistics as a window into mental representations

Abstract

Large-scale linguistic data is nowadays available in abundance. Using this source of data, previous research has identified redundancies between the statistical structure of natural language and properties of the (physical) world we live in. For example, it has been shown that we can gauge city sizes by analyzing their respective word frequencies in corpora. However, since natural language is always produced by human speakers, we point out that such redundancies can only come about indirectly and should necessarily be restricted cases where human representations largely retain characteristics of the physical world. To demonstrate this, we examine the statistical occurrence of words referring to body parts in very different languages, covering nearly 4 billions of native speakers. This is because the convergence between language and physical properties of the stimuli clearly breaks down for the human body (i.e., more relevant and functional body parts are not necessarily larger in size). Our findings indicate that the human body as extracted from language does not retain its actual physical proportions; instead, it resembles the distorted human-like figure known as the sensory homunculus, whose form depicts the amount of cortical area dedicated to sensorimotor functions of each body part (and, thus, their relative functional relevance). This demonstrates that the surface-level statistical structure of language opens a window into how humans represent the world they live in, rather than into the world itself.

A Body Map Beyond Perceptual Experience

“…This means that a body map can be approximated from linguistic data (e.g., Louwerse & Benesh, 2012). Complementary to this, previous studies investigating body parts dimensions have shown that these, when extracted from natural language (i.e., examining the frequencies of words referring to body parts across several languages, hence with a very different approach from the one employed here), are distorted towards the sensory homunculus rather than the actual body proportions (Günther & Rinaldi, 2022). However, notwithstanding the overall convergence between the real body map and the linguistic one, the language-based body was distorted as compared to the real body, since a good portion of variance remained unexplained.…”

Addressing the Emotional Body in Patients With Chronic Pain

“…3 This interrupts a coherent, integrated experience so that the body appears as a mere physical object that hurts and is experienced as dysfunctional. 4 The semantically charged lived body, on the other hand, which largely corresponds to the proportions of the sensory homunculus, 5 can thus be understood as an essential part of the pain memory in the pain disease and thus also becomes accessible to psychotherapeutic procedures. However, these procedures must necessarily also address the embodied psychological experience, ie, the patient must reperceive the emotion associated with the bodily sensation as their very own emotion so that it can be understood, transformed, and regulated both in relation to the past and in the current context.…”