Topic — perception (15 entries)

The underlying physiology of taste is far better understood than that of smell. There are five types of receptor, namely for sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (glutamic acid). In… More →

What resources do languages have for describing smells? Is there dedicated vocabulary for encoding olfaction, and if so what are the types of distinctions that are encoded? And, finally, how… More →

Newborn infants learn about the world around them through touch. Piaget famously noted the importance of manual and oral exploration of objects for developing spatial cognition and knowledge of the… More →

This task explores natural, non-expert, metalanguage for sounds in the language under study. In English, for example, sound metalanguage is quite rich. We talk about unpleasant sounds as noise (in… More →

We are interested to find how, and to what extent, your language makes shape distinctions. This area of visual experience is in principle “effable” in the sense that a child… More →

This entry provides an overview of some linguistic phenomena pertinent to the “language of perception”, and is a necessary companion to the elicitation tasks later in the field manual. The… More →

Synaesthesia is a condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality (e.g. hearing) causes additional experiences in a second, unstimulated modality (e.g. seeing colours). The goal of this task is… More →

The senses are not only physiological phenomena, but they are also linguistic, cultural, and social. The goal of this task is to explore and describe sociocultural patterns relating language of perception, ideologies of perception, and perceptual practice in our speech communities.

This field guide is for eliciting information about grammatical resources used in describing perceptual events and perception-based properties and states. A list of leading questions outlines an underlying semantic space… More →

In this task we aim to find what the best exemplars or “focal colours” of each basic colour term is in our field languages. This is an important part of… More →