According to widespread opinion, the meaning of body part terms is determined by salient discontinuities in the visual image; such that hands, feet, arms, and legs, are natural parts. If so, one would expect these parts to have distinct names which correspond in meaning across languages. To test this proposal, we compared three unrelated languages—Dutch, Japanese, and Indonesian—and found both naming systems and boundaries of even basic body part terms display variation across languages. Bottom-up cues alone cannot explain natural language (...) semantic systems; there simply is not a one-to-one mapping of the body semantic system to the body structural description. Although body parts are flexibly construed across languages, body parts semantics are, nevertheless, constrained by non-linguistic representations in the body structural description, suggesting these are necessary, although not sufficient, in accounting for aspects of the body lexicon. (shrink)

Words that describe sensory perception give insight into how language mediates human experience, and the acquisition of these words is one way to examine how we learn to categorize and communicate sensation. We examine the differential predictions of the typological prevalence hypothesis and embodiment hypothesis regarding the acquisition of perception verbs. Studies 1 and 2 examine the acquisition trajectories of perception verbs across 12 languages using parent questionnaire responses, while Study 3 examines their relative frequencies in English corpus data. We (...) find the vision verbs see and look are acquired first, consistent with the typological prevalence hypothesis. However, for children at 12–23 months, touch—not audition—verbs take precedence in terms of their age of acquisition, frequency in child‐produced speech, and frequency in child‐directed speech, consistent with the embodiment hypothesis. Later at 24–35 months old, frequency rates are observably different and audition begins to align with what has previously been reported in adult English data. It seems the initial orientation to verbalizing touch over audition in child–caregiver interaction is especially related to the control of physically and socially appropriate behaviors. Taken together, the results indicate children's acquisition of perception verbs arises from the complex interplay of embodiment, language‐specific input, and child‐directed socialization routines. (shrink)

According to widespread opinion, the meaning of body part terms is determined by salient discontinuities in the visual image; such that hands, feet, arms, and legs, are natural parts. If so, one would expect these parts to have distinct names which correspond in meaning across languages. To test this proposal, we compared three unrelated languages—Dutch, Japanese, and Indonesian—and found both naming systems and boundaries of even basic body part terms display variation across languages. Bottom‐up cues alone cannot explain natural language (...) semantic systems; there simply is not a one‐to‐one mapping of the body semantic system to the body structural description. Although body parts are flexibly construed across languages, body parts semantics are, nevertheless, constrained by non‐linguistic representations in the body structural description, suggesting these are necessary, although not sufficient, in accounting for aspects of the body lexicon. (shrink)