Frequency of occurrence and rankings for touch-related adjectives

Abstract

A three-phased study was conducted in order to develop a standardized list of touch-related adjectives. The final list consisted of 306 words that were categorized in 440 instances according to the Lederman and Klatzky (1987, 1990)dimensions of haptic properties (some words were classified in more than one dimension). The Kucera and Francis (1967)frequency of occurrence in written English for all words in the final list was also determined. A correlation was found between frequency of occurrence on the list and Kucera and Francis frequency. An analysis of the word dimensions and future applications are discussed.

Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex

“…Texture is particularly salient to touch (Klatzky, Lederman & Reed, 1987), which tends to dominate vision in texture perception (Guest and Spence, 2003) and exceeds vision at discriminating fine textures (Heller, 1989). In addition, the texture words used were predominantly related to touch (see, for example, Stadtlander & Murdoch, 2000; Lynott & Connell, 2009) and many metaphors were likely more easily interpreted by reference to touch than vision. For example, the phrases ‘a rough day’ or ‘a slimy person’ have negative connotations because they refer to attributes that may be particularly unpleasant to touch.…”

Multisensory design: Reaching out to touch the consumer

“…Once the message to be communicated by touch has been defined, the challenge becomes one of choosing those tactile sensations that are best suited to deliver that message (e.g., Smets & Overbeeke, 1995). Unfortunately, this step is further complicated by the fact that a proper “lexicon of touch” is still lacking (e.g., Philippe et al, 2003; Spence & Gallace, 2008; though see also Johnson, 2007; Stadtlander & Murdoch, 2000). That is, tactile sensations are not as easily labeled as visual sensations (see Sonneveldt & Schifferstein, 2008).…”

Trilled /r/ is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages

“…For humans, the texture of objects and materials is an important characteristic that determines how they are used and evaluated 9 , 10 . Not surprisingly then, languages generally have dedicated subsets of their vocabulary for the description of texture 11 , 12 , potentially consisting of several hundred words as in the case of English 13 , e.g., rough, smooth, hard, soft, coarse, cottony, fuzzy, silky, oily , and more. Here, we focus on the textural dimension of roughness, which persistently emerges as the dominant perceptual dimension of surface touch when different textures are compared to each other 14 , 15 .…”