The Language of Touch

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 world. There are a number of receptors and nerve endings in our skin that perform different information processing tasks. Pain, temperature, itchiness, etc. are all conveyed through the skin. The goal of this task is to investigate how languages encode tactile texture – specifically (1) whether there is dedicated vocabulary for encoding texture and (2) how much consistency there is within a community for describing tactile texture.

Prerequisites

You must have completed Language of perception (pp. 10-21).
To conduct this task you need (i) texture booklet and (ii) blindfold.

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This Field Manual entry can be downloaded from the MPG Publication Repository:
https://doi.org/10.17617/2.492907

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