Augmented Modality Exclusivity Norms for Concrete and Abstract Italian Property Words

Abstract

How perceptual information is encoded into language and conceptual knowledge is a debated topic in cognitive (neuro)science. We present modality exclusivity norms for 643 Italian property words referring to all five perceptual modalities, plus a set of abstract words. Overall, words were rated as mostly connected to the visual modality and least connected to the olfactory and gustatory modality. We found that words associated to visual and auditory experience were more unimodal compared to words associated to other sensory modalities. A principal components analysis highlighted a strong coupling between gustatory and olfactory information in word meaning, and the tendency of words referring to tactile experience to also include information from the visual dimension. Abstract words were found to encode only marginal perceptual information, mostly from visual and auditory experience. The modality norms were augmented with corpus–based (e.g., Zipf Frequency, Orthographic Levenshtein Distance 20) and ratings–based psycholinguistic variables (Age of Acquisition, Familiarity, Contextual Availability). Split-half correlations performed for each experimental variable con- firmed that our norms are highly reliable. This database thus provides a new important tool for investigating the interplay between language, perception and cognition.

The Italian Sensorimotor Norms: perception and action strength measures for 959 words

“…Considering the sensorimotor variables together, the vision was the most dominant dimension (54%), while the movement of the torso was the least dominant (1%). Our results were in line with previous works, suggesting a striking dominance of the visual modality (Lynott et al, 2020;Morucci et al, 2019;Vergallito et al, 2020), and reporting smell and torso as the least dominant dimensions for sensory and motor modalities, respectively (Lynott et al, 2020).…”

“…Likewise, words that were more related to internal states obtained lower ratings for touch/vision and higher score for interoception, like aborto (abortion) or infatuazione (infatuation). Moreover, correlations were observed between taste and smell (r = .589), and between touch and vision (r = .600), in line with other studies on Italian words (Morucci et al, 2019;Vergallito et al, 2020). As regards the first one, the relationship could be associated with all objects and actions related to food, like cucinare (to cook) or latte (milk).…”

“…More recently new corpora incorporating sensorimotor dimensions have been developed, although not including all the aforementioned variables. For example, Morucci and colleagues (Morucci et al, 2019) and Vergallito and co-authors (Vergallito et al, 2020) collected ratings only of five perceptual modalities, while Villani and colleagues (Villani et al, 2019) rated 425 abstract nouns on 15 dimensions including the perceptual strength based on the 5 perceptual modalities, the motor dimensions, namely the BOI and the hand-and mouth-related actions, as well as other classical psycholinguistic features, but lacking affective properties.…”

Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology

“…Modality exclusivity norms from English reveal a set of smell-associated words, although these are fewer in number than for the other senses. Studies have confirmed the same trend in several European languages (Dutch [130], Italian [131,132], Russian [133], Serbian [134]) and in Mandarin [135]. Critically, no norms have yet been collected from languages with attested smell vocabularies.…”

Dutch Sensory Modality Norms

“…In recent years, several databases of sensory modality norms have been released for a number of languages (Chen, Zhao, Long, Lu, & Huang, 2019;Filipović Đurđević, Popović Stijačić, & Karapandžić, 2016;Lynott & Connell, 2009Lynott, Connell, Brysbaert, Brand, & Carney, 2020;Miklashevsky, 2018;Morucci, Bottini, & Crepaldi, 2019;Speed & Majid, 2017;van Dantzig, Cowell, Zeelenberg, & Pecher, 2011;Vergallito, Petilli, & Marelli, 2020;Winter, 2016). Sensory modality norms reflect participant judgments of how concepts are related to the sensory modalities.…”