ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Differential coding of perception in the world's languages.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers.
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Who cites it
59 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- The vertical symphony: how pitch perception shapes spatial and affective mapping across different countries.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Article
- Semantic similarity across languages reflects neurocognitive dimensions shaped by climate.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Moving, Seeing, Hearing, Smelling and Tasting: How Sensory-Motor Experiences Shape Early Cognitive Development.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Human pairs show collective benefit in olfactory perception despite individual differences and verbal limits.iScience · 2026Article
- Linguistic diversity and theory in psychological science.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Human turn-taking development: A multi-faceted review of turn-taking comprehension and production in the first years of life.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Multilingual Computational Models Capture a Shared Meaning Component in Brain Responses across 21 Languages.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Losing Your Sense of Smell: How Bad Is It?-A Comparative Study on the Personal Importance of Smell.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Free odor identification engages domain-general cognitive abilities in old adults.Chemical senses · 2025Article
- Pathogen stress heightens sensorimotor dimensions in the human collective semantic space.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Investigating Self-Reported Sensory Intolerance and Perceptual Ability Across Sensory Modalities in Fibromyalgia.Journal of pain research · 2025Article
- Cues for odor naming affect performance and brain connectivity.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Grammatical gender universalities underlying uniform mental representations of the world: Myth or reality?Heliyon · 2024Article
- Culture shapes how we describe facial expressions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Large language models predict human sensory judgments across six modalities.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Dimensions of wisdom perception across twelve countries on five continents.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Congenital absence of touch does not preclude normal cognitive and socioemotional development.Research square · 2024Article
- Olfactory Categorization Is Shaped by a Transmodal Cortical Network for Evaluating Perceptual Predictions.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
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26 authors.
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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.
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