Sensory language across lexical categories

Lievers, Francesca Strik; Winter, Bodo

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2017.11.002

Cited by 64 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Use of these norms as semantic variables, whether as an aggregate measure of sensorimotor strength or as modality-and effector-specific ratings, will inform psycholinguistic models of word recognition and language processing (e.g., Connell & Lynott, 2016a;Estes, Verges, & Adelman, 2015;Speed & Majid, 2017; see also Connell & Lynott, 2016b, for a review). The parallels between the sensorimotor dimensions in the present norms and specific brain regions related to perceptual and action processing mean that close examination of the roles and interactions of each dimension will be able to inform theories of grounded representation and embodied semantics (e.g., Connell et al, 2018;Lievers & Winter, 2018;Rey, Riou, Vallet, & Versace, 2017). For instance, we are currently using the norms to examine emergent conceptual structure from sensorimotor knowledge (Connell, Brand, Carney, Brysbaert, Banks, & Lynott, 2019;, and the role of sensorimotor experience in categorization (Banks, Wingfield, & Connell, 2019;van Hoef, Connell, & Lynott, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words

et al. 2019

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Sensorimotor information plays a fundamental role in cognition. However, the existing materials that measure the sensorimotor basis of word meanings and concepts have been restricted in terms of their sample size and breadth of sensorimotor experience.Here we present norms of sensorimotor strength for 39,707 concepts across six perceptual modalities (touch, hearing, smell, taste, vision, and interoception) and five action effectors (mouth/throat, hand/arm, foot/leg, head excluding mouth/throat, and torso), gathered from a total of 3,500 individual participants using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms are unique and innovative in a number of respects: They represent the largest-ever set of semantic norms for English, at 40,000 words × 11 dimensions (plus several informative cross-dimensional variables), they extend perceptual strength norming to the new modality of interoception, and they include the first norming of action strength across separate bodily effectors. In the first study, we describe the data collection procedures, provide summary descriptives of the dataset, and interpret the relations observed between sensorimotor dimensions. We then report two further studies, in which we (1) extracted an optimal singlevariable composite of the 11-dimension sensorimotor profile (Minkowski 3 strength) and (2) demonstrated the utility of both perceptual and action strength in facilitating lexical decision times and accuracy in two separate datasets. These norms provide a valuable resource to researchers in diverse areas, including psycholinguistics, grounded cognition, cognitive semantics, knowledge representation, machine learning, and big-data approaches to the analysis of language and conceptual representations. The data are accessible via the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/7emr6/) and an interactive web application (https://www. lancaster.ac.uk/psychology/lsnorms/).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words

et al. 2019

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“…The fact that visual dominance in the lexicon-as well as the diminution of taste and smell-holds across nouns, verbs, and adjectives is particularly important. Although these grammatical categories are best defined distributionally (see Baker & Croft, 2017), each of these parts-of-speech is associated with particular semantic prototypes: timevarying events, processes and actions for verbs; time-stable objects and entities for nouns; and properties of intermediate temporal stability for adjectives (Givón, 1979(Givón, , 2001(Givón, [1984; Gärdenfors, 2014;Langacker, 2008;Murphy, 2010;Strik Lievers & Winter, 2018). Thus, nouns, verbs and adjectives serve quite different functions within a language, both morphosyntactically (their role within sentences), as well as semantically (the typical types of meaning they denote).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vision dominates in perceptual language: English sensory vocabulary is optimized for usage

2018

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Researchers have suggested that the vocabularies of languages are oriented towards the communicative needs of language users. Here, we provide evidence demonstrating that the higher frequency of visual words in a large variety of English corpora is reflected in greater lexical differentiation-a greater number of unique words-for the visual domain in the English lexicon. In comparison, sensory modalities that are less frequently talked about, particularly taste and smell, show less lexical differentiation. In addition, we show that even though sensory language can be expected to change across historical time and between contexts of use (e.g., spoken language versus fiction), the pattern of visual dominance is a stable property of the English language. Thus, we show that across the board, precisely those semantic domains that are more frequently talked about are also more lexically differentiated, for perceptual experiences. This correlation between type and token frequencies suggests that the sensory lexicon of English is geared towards communicative efficiency.

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“…The use of lexical class to classify meanings into broad semantic categories is supported by theories of cognitive grammar, which posit that classes such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives reflect conceptual prototypes ( Givón, 2001 ; Langacker, 2008 ; also see Strik Lievers and Winter, 2018 ). For example, according to Langacker, nouns are rooted in the prototype of a physical object, a ‘thing’ (i.e., subsuming people and places and not limited to physical entities); verbs typically refer to actions and events, profiling change over time; and adjectives typically specify more static properties.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iconicity in Signed and Spoken Vocabulary: A Comparison Between American Sign Language, British Sign Language, English, and Spanish

et al. 2018

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Considerable evidence now shows that all languages, signed and spoken, exhibit a significant amount of iconicity. We examined how the visual-gestural modality of signed languages facilitates iconicity for different kinds of lexical meanings compared to the auditory-vocal modality of spoken languages. We used iconicity ratings of hundreds of signs and words to compare iconicity across the vocabularies of two signed languages – American Sign Language and British Sign Language, and two spoken languages – English and Spanish. We examined (1) the correlation in iconicity ratings between the languages; (2) the relationship between iconicity and an array of semantic variables (ratings of concreteness, sensory experience, imageability, perceptual strength of vision, audition, touch, smell and taste); (3) how iconicity varies between broad lexical classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, grammatical words and adverbs); and (4) between more specific semantic categories (e.g., manual actions, clothes, colors). The results show several notable patterns that characterize how iconicity is spread across the four vocabularies. There were significant correlations in the iconicity ratings between the four languages, including English with ASL, BSL, and Spanish. The highest correlation was between ASL and BSL, suggesting iconicity may be more transparent in signs than words. In each language, iconicity was distributed according to the semantic variables in ways that reflect the semiotic affordances of the modality (e.g., more concrete meanings more iconic in signs, not words; more auditory meanings more iconic in words, not signs; more tactile meanings more iconic in both signs and words). Analysis of the 220 meanings with ratings in all four languages further showed characteristic patterns of iconicity across broad and specific semantic domains, including those that distinguished between signed and spoken languages (e.g., verbs more iconic in ASL, BSL, and English, but not Spanish; manual actions especially iconic in ASL and BSL; adjectives more iconic in English and Spanish; color words especially low in iconicity in ASL and BSL). These findings provide the first quantitative account of how iconicity is spread across the lexicons of signed languages in comparison to spoken languages.

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Sensory language across lexical categories

Cited by 64 publications

References 53 publications

The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words

The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words

Vision dominates in perceptual language: English sensory vocabulary is optimized for usage

Iconicity in Signed and Spoken Vocabulary: A Comparison Between American Sign Language, British Sign Language, English, and Spanish

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