The project was organised around three scientific work packages (WPs). WP “Typology” involved the manual compilation of a genealogically and geographically stratified sample of basic perception verb lexicons in 100 spoken languages. This database served as the empirical basis for two large-scale studies. The first analysed the mappings between perception verb forms and sense meanings. This established that there is a strong cross-linguistic bias for the visual modality to be expressed with a dedicated perception verb, but that the non-visual modalities do not pattern hierarchically. The study also revealed that certain cross-modal combinations (e.g. hear-feel) are commonly expressed in polysemous verbs across languages, while others, most notably smell-taste, are rare. The bias against smell-taste polysemy goes against the commonly held idea that meanings that are conceptually close are more likely to be co-expressed in words, and may instead be driven by general communicative pressures (ambiguity avoidance). This research was published in Language, the flagship journal of linguistics (Norcliffe & Majid 2024a), and won the award for Best Paper in Language for that year. A second study extended the focus to patterns of word formation in perception verb lexicons. Perception verbs sometimes extend their meaning to a different sensory meaning through processes of word formation. This study found that across languages, semantic extensions of this type tended to proceed from higher to lower sense modalities. While this is consistent with Viberg’s original generalisation, the study showed that human biology does not need to be directly invoked to explain it. Previous research has shown that the directionality of semantic extensions in word formation is predicted by word frequency: words that are sources of extensions tend to be more frequent than the derivations. Lexical frequency therefore is likely the direct cause of the directionality finding, as it has been shown that vision and audition verbs tend to be more frequent than the lower senses. This does not rule out the possibility that the frequency patterns themselves are shaped by the relative dominance of the senses in human perception, though research suggests that the frequency patterns are more likely the outcome of convergent factors. This study was published in Linguistic Typology (Norcliffe and Majid 2024b).
WP “Cognition” examined the acquisition trajectories of perception verbs among English speaking children, using data from parent questionnaires and corpora of children’s spontaneous speech. This revealed that visual perception verbs are acquired earliest, mirroring the dominance of vision in lexical systems. Intriguingly, touch rather than audition verbs came second, in both age of acquisition and production frequency. This finding was replicated in acquisition data from a further 11 languages. The robust touch-before-hearing result possibly reflects the early relevance of the tactile modality for infants, for whom much of the experienced world is explored through the hands. It may also be driven by the speech of caregivers about behaviour regulation, especially prohibitions against touching, raising fascinating questions for future study about how individual sensory experience interacts with linguistic input to scaffold language learning. This study was published in Cognitive Science (San Roque, Norcliffe & Majid 2024).
Data collection and analysis for WP “Phylogeny” are ongoing. This WP is exploring whether perception verbs denoting the different senses evolve at different rates in accordance with the sense hierarchy, in the context of the Mayan language family.
The results of the project were disseminated at conferences, workshops and seminars straddling linguistics and cognitive science. A theme session, “Words and Meanings", was also organised at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Wider publicity within the linguistics community was achieved following the publication of the Language paper. This was selected as one of the four ‘most interesting’ papers published in the journal that year and resulted in an invitation to speak at a ‘meet-the-author’ webinar organised by the Linguistics Society of America. Many of project results are summarised as part of a larger review article on ‘The Lexical Typology of Sensory Perception’ (Majid & Norcliffe 2026).
