The study of average perceptual strength of five senses in the Persian language

Articles in Press

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Authors
S. Sharifi 1
N. B. Sabouri 2
1 Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
2 Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics and Foreign Languages, Payame Noor University, Tehran. Iran
Abstract
The purpose of this research is to determine the average perceptual strength of the five senses in the Persian language based on average perceptual strength hierarchy by Lynott and Connell (2009). To achieve this goal, (100) commonly used Persian sensory adjectives and (25) native Persian-speaking subjects were used to express their level of sensory perception of each adjective based on the 5-point Likert Scale. Also, (20) other subjects were asked to choose names for the given adjectives. These tests were carried out to answer these questions: what percentage of adjectives are exclusively attributed to one of the five senses, how much was the total score of each sense on the 5-point Likert Scale, and as overall which sense has the highest average perceptual strength؟ Also is the rate of collocations of names and adjectives of the same domain more than the collocations of nouns and adjectives of different domains, as Lynott and Connell believe? The results showed the average perceptual strength of the senses in Persian data is different from the findings of Lynott and Connell (2009) only in the position of the sense of hearing, also according to their findings, the sense of vision has the highest and the sense of smell has the lowest average perceptual strength among the five senses. In terms of collocation of names and adjectives, it was found that with a little consideration, Lynott and Connell’s idea about the larger number of the same-domain sensory name- adjective collocations can be accepted.














Keywords

Subjects

Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual Thinking, University of California Press.
Cain, W. S. (1979). To know with the nose: keys to odor identification. Science, 203, 467–470.
Huisman, J. L., & Majid, A. (2018). Psycholinguistic variables matter in odor naming. Memory & Cognition, 46, 577–588.
Hawes, D. (2002). Nose-wise: olfactory metaphor in Mind, In C. Rouby; B. Schaal; D. Dubois; R. Gervais and A. Holley (eds.): Olfaction, Taste and Cognition, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 67-82.
Köster, E.P. (2002). The specific characteristics of the sense of smell. In D. Dubois, C. Rouby &B. Schaal (eds.): Odor and Cognition, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 27-43.
Kövecses, Z. (2019). Perception and metaphor: The case of smell, In Laura J. Speed, Carolyn O'Meara, Lila San Roque and Asifa Majid (Eds.), Perception Metaphors, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 327–346.
Levinson, S. C., & Majid, A. (2014). Differential ineffability and the senses. Mind & Language 29, 407-427.
Lynott, D., & Connell, L. (2009). Modality exclusivity norms for 423 object properties. Behavior, Research Methods, 41, 558–564.
Majid, A., Levinson, S. (2011). The senses in language and culture, Senses and Society, 6(1), 5-18.
Miller, G. A., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1976). Language and perception. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mousavi, Sh., Amouzadeh, M. (2020). I hear the smell of roses: Semantic aspects of synaesthetic Constructions in Persian, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 18(2), 397-427.
Olofsson, J. K., & Gottfried, J. A. (2015). The muted sense: neurocognitive limitations of olfacatory language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19, 314–32.
Rabin, M. D., & Cain, W. S. (1984). Odor recognition: Familiarity, identifiability, and encoding consistency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10(2), 316–325.
Rakova, M. (2003). The extent of the literal: Metaphor, polysemy and theories of concepts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Shen, Y., & Cohen, M. (1998). How come silence is sweet but sweetness is not silent: a cognitive account of directionality in poetic synaesthesia. Language and Literature, 7, 123–140
Strik Lievers, F., & Winter, B. (2018). Sensory language across lexical categories. Lingua, 204, 45–61.
Winter, B., Perlman, M., & Majid, A. (2018). Vision dominates in perceptual language: English sensory vocabulary is optimized for usage. Cognition, 179, 213–220.
Winter, B. (2019). Sensory linguistics: Language, Perception and Metaphor, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Yeshurun, Y., & Sobel, N. (2010). An odor is not worth a thousand words: from multidimensional odors to unidimensional odor objects. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 219–241.
Language Related Research

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 13 July 2025