Differential coding of perception in the world's languages
Differential coding of perception in the world's languages
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1720419115
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发表时间：
2018-11-06
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Levinson, Stephen C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Majid, Asifa;Roberts, Sean G.;Levinson, Stephen C.
是否存在一种普遍的感官层次结构，使得某些感官（例如视觉）比其他感官（例如气味）更容易被意识和语言描述所理解？西方思想中长期以来的假设是，视觉和听觉比其他感官更客观，是知识和理解的基础，而触觉、味觉和嗅觉是粗糙的，没有什么价值。这表明人类应该比其他感官更擅长交流视觉和听觉，数十年基于英语和相关语言的研究无疑表明这是事实。然而，这在多大程度上反映了全球语言和社区的多样性？为了测试是否存在普遍的感官层次结构，来自五种基本感官的刺激被用来引出 20 种不同语言的描述，其中包括 3 种不相关的手语。我们发现，不同语言在系统编码的感官领域以及编码方式上存在根本差异。某些领域的更好编码趋势可以部分地用文化关注来解释。尽管语言似乎可以自由地阐述特定的感官领域，但还是出现了一些普遍趋势：例如，除了一些例外，气味的编码很差。令人惊讶的是，尽管感官的系统发育逐渐积累，并且专门负责它们的神经组织存在不平衡，但没有单一的感官层次结构强加于语言。
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.