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.
Download
This Field Manual entry can be downloaded from the MPG Publication Repository:
https://doi.org/10.17617/2.492907
The stimulus materials are not yet available for distribution.
How to cite this resource?
- Citation
- Majid, A., Senft, G., & Levinson, S. C. (2007). The language of touch. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field Manual Volume 10 (pp. 32-35). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492907.
Volume 2007 , filed under Categories across language and cognition.
Tags: perception, touch