Abstract
Language acquisition is based on our knowledge about the world and forms through multiple sensory-motor interactions with the environment. We link the properties of individual experience formed at different stages of ontogeny with the phased development of sensory modalities and with the acquisition of words describing the appropriate forms of sensitivity. To test whether early-formed experience related to skin sensations, olfaction and taste differs from later-formed experience related to vision and hearing, we asked Russian-speaking participants to categorize or to assess the pleasantness of experience mentally reactivated by sense-related adjectives found in common dictionaries. It was found that categorizing adjectives in relation to vision, hearing and skin sensations took longer than categorizing adjectives in relation to olfaction and taste. In addition, experience described by adjectives predominantly related to vision, hearing and skin sensations took more time for the pleasantness judgment and generated less intense emotions than that described by adjectives predominantly related to olfaction and taste. Interestingly the dynamics of skin resistance corresponded to the intensity and pleasantness of reported emotions. We also found that sense-related experience described by early-acquired adjectives took less time for the pleasantness judgment and generated more intense and more positive emotions than that described by later-acquired adjectives. Correlations were found between the time of the pleasantness judgment of experience, intensity and pleasantness of reported emotions, age of acquisition, frequency, imageability and length of sense-related adjectives. All in all these findings support the hypothesis that early-formed experience is less differentiated than later-formed experience.
Highlights
Our knowledge forms through multiple sensory-motor interactions with the environment
To test the assumption that adjectives related to skin sensations are heterogeneous, we presented an independent sample of 62 native Russian-speaking psychology students (50 women, aged 17 to 33, median age 18) with 120 adjectives related to skin sensitivity for additional categorization
By comparing the time of the pleasantness judgment of experience related to different senses (Fig 7) we found that it was longer for experience related to vision, hearing or various skin sensations than for that related to taste or olfaction
Summary
Our knowledge forms through multiple sensory-motor interactions with the environment. All knowledge can be viewed as a set of internal models of individual interactions with the environment. Another position suggests that knowledge is stored in the form of symbols [2], the idea of a strong connection between language and interactions has been consistent and is attracting more experimental support [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12], as are the theories that knowledge is embodied (see, e.g., [13,14,15]). This study is aimed to analyse the peculiarities of the structure of experience related to different senses through the mental reactivation of experience and its pleasantness judgment
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