Abstract
Perceptual experience through the five modalities (i.e., vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) has demonstrated its key role in semantics. Researchers also highlighted the role of interoceptive information in the grounded representation of concepts. However, to this day, there is no available data across these modalities in the French language. Therefore, the aim of this study was to circumvent this caveat. Participants aged between 18 and 50 completed an online survey in which we recorded scores of perceptual strength (PS), interoceptive information, imageability, concreteness, conceptual familiarity, and age of acquisition of 270 words of the French language. We also analysed the relationships between perceptual modalities and psycholinguistic variables. Results showed that vast majority of concepts were visually-dominant. Correlation analyses revealed that the five PS variables were strongly correlated with imageability, concreteness, and conceptual familiarity and highlight that PS variables index one aspect of the semantic representations of a word. On the other hand, high interoceptive scores were highlighted only for the less imageable and less concrete words, emphasizing their importance for the grounding of abstract concepts. Future research could use these norms in the investigation of the role of perceptual experience in the representation of concepts and their impact on word processing.
Highlights
Traditional conceptualizations of semantic knowledge mainly focused on the investigation of how concepts are organised in memory, notably by analysing relationships between them (Quillian, 1967; Collins and Loftus, 1975) or by evaluating their shared and distinct features (Farah and McClelland, 1991; McRae et al, 1997; Tyler and Moss, 2001; Vigliocco et al, 2004; Rogers et al, 2006)
This study provided norms for 270 French words for the five classic sensory modalities as well as the interoceptive modality that is based on the perceptual experience of individuals
The associations highlighted between the semantic psycholinguistic variables and the five perceptual variables underline the richness of the conceptual representations
Summary
Traditional conceptualizations of semantic knowledge mainly focused on the investigation of how concepts are organised in memory, notably by analysing relationships between them (Quillian, 1967; Collins and Loftus, 1975) or by evaluating their shared and distinct features (Farah and McClelland, 1991; McRae et al, 1997; Tyler and Moss, 2001; Vigliocco et al, 2004; Rogers et al, 2006). The investigation of the conceptual involvement in semantic memory requires appropriate stimuli In this perspective, norms have been developed to capture the degree to which a word evokes a sensory and/or perceptual experience in the participant’s mind (Juhasz et al, 2011; Juhasz and Yap, 2013; Bonin et al, 2015). Norms have been developed to capture the degree to which a word evokes a sensory and/or perceptual experience in the participant’s mind (Juhasz et al, 2011; Juhasz and Yap, 2013; Bonin et al, 2015) In these studies, participants were asked to rate on a Likert scale the degree to which any given word evokes a sensory experience in a single note. It has been shown that perceptual and conceptual processing share a disadvantage in the tactile modality relative to other perceptual modalities; people are slower and less accurate in detecting stimuli related to tactile sensations (Spence et al, 2001; Turatto et al, 2004) and are slower and less accurate in detecting words that evoke touch (Connell and Lynott, 2010)
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