Sylvia Tufvesson
Biographic Data
| ID | 790858 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sylvia Tufvesson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sylvia |
| FAMILY NAME | Tufvesson |
| SIGNATURE | TUFVESSON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Society |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 6 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 6 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages
Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. This predicts that humans ought to …
What sound symbolism can and cannot do
What sound symbolism can and cannot do
Sound symbolism is a phenomenon with broad relevance to the study of language and mind, but there has been a disconnect between its investigations in linguistics and psychology. This study tests the sound-symbolic potential of ideophones-words described as iconic-in an experimental task that improves over prior work in terms of ecological validity and experimental control. We presented 203 ideophones from five languages to eighty-two Dutch listen…
Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies
To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is alw…
Aslian linguistic prehistory
This paper analyzes newly collected lexical data from 26 languages of the Aslian subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family using computational phylogenetic methods. We show the most likely topology of the Aslian family tree, discuss rooting and external relationships to other Austroasiatic languages, and investigate differences in the rates of diversification of different branches. Evidence is given supporting the classification of Jah Hut as…
Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World
In the interplay between language, culture, and perception, iconicity structures our representations of what we experience. By examining secondary iconicity in sensory vocabulary, this study draws attention to diagrammatic qualities in human interaction with, and representation of, the sensory world. In semai (Mon-Khmer, Aslian), spoken on Peninsular Malaysia, sensory experiences are encoded by expressives. Expressives display a diagrammatic icon…
What sound symbolism can and cannot do
Sound symbolism is a phenomenon with broad relevance to the study of language and mind, but there has been a disconnect between its investigations in linguistics and psychology. This study tests the sound-symbolic potential of ideophones-words described as iconic-in an experimental task that improves over prior work in terms of ecological validity and experimental control. We presented 203 ideophones from five languages to eighty-two Dutch listen…
Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World
In the interplay between language, culture, and perception, iconicity structures our representations of what we experience. By examining secondary iconicity in sensory vocabulary, this study draws attention to diagrammatic qualities in human interaction with, and representation of, the sensory world. In semai (Mon-Khmer, Aslian), spoken on Peninsular Malaysia, sensory experiences are encoded by expressives. Expressives display a diagrammatic icon…
Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies
To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is alw…
What sound symbolism can and cannot do
Aslian linguistic prehistory
This paper analyzes newly collected lexical data from 26 languages of the Aslian subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family using computational phylogenetic methods. We show the most likely topology of the Aslian family tree, discuss rooting and external relationships to other Austroasiatic languages, and investigate differences in the rates of diversification of different branches. Evidence is given supporting the classification of Jah Hut as…
Analogy-making in the Semai Sensory World
In the interplay between language, culture, and perception, iconicity structures our representations of what we experience. By examining secondary iconicity in sensory vocabulary, this study draws attention to diagrammatic qualities in human interaction with, and representation of, the sensory world. In semai (Mon-Khmer, Aslian), spoken on Peninsular Malaysia, sensory experiences are encoded by expressives. Expressives display a diagrammatic icon…
Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies
To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is alw…
What sound symbolism can and cannot do
What sound symbolism can and cannot do
Sound symbolism is a phenomenon with broad relevance to the study of language and mind, but there has been a disconnect between its investigations in linguistics and psychology. This study tests the sound-symbolic potential of ideophones-words described as iconic-in an experimental task that improves over prior work in terms of ecological validity and experimental control. We presented 203 ideophones from five languages to eighty-two Dutch listen…
Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages
Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. This predicts that humans ought to …
Linguistics (6 works) · Multisensory perception and integration (5 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Categorization, perception, and language (3 works) · Cognitive psychology (3 works) · Communication (3 works) · Iconicity (3 works) · Perception (3 works) · Cognitive science (2 works)