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Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 8.1 Dipartimento di Linguistica – Università di Pisa

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Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online ISSN 1724-5230 Volume 8.1 (2010) – pagg. 109-157 S. Ricci – “A hierarchy of senses: does it make sense? On linguistic synaesthesia and its directionality”

A HIERARCHY OF SENSES: DOES IT MAKE SENSE?

ON LINGUISTIC SYNAESTHESIA AND ITS DIRECTIONALITY SARA RICCI

1. Raising the problem

The blood that pulses through our veins is a motion which

accompanies all of our life. We can easily feel it by placing our

fingers on the wrists or on the neck. The touch is the only sense we

have available to make our body detect the pulse: it cannot be seen, or

listened to, nor smelt or tasted. When the point comes to include

pulsetaking in the medical discourse and to appreciate all its features

in order to relate them to the diagnosis of illnesses and consequent

healing practices, the perception of the pulse become crucial.

Can human touch be enough to properly perceive it in all its

features? What is exactly perceived under the fingers? How can the

qualities of perception be described and unmistakably shared in the

medical community, so that a discourse on the pulse can be pursued?

The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and

Chinese Medicine by Shigheisa Kuryiama (Kuriyama, 2002) is a

beautifully written book of the history of medicine which, among

other fascinating topics, also addresses this problem of perceiving and

communicating perceptions. For what is concerned here, it is

interesting to mention that, according to Kuryiama, the dramatic

divergence of the Greek and the Chinese approach to pulsetaking



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stems precisely from the two different solutions given to the problem

of conveying sensory perceptions through language. Basically,

Chinese physicians relied on touch, while Greek physicians did not.

They preferred to investigate the phenomenon of pulsation relying on

the sense of sight and describing it through visual metaphors,

considering vision a better source for an objective and transparent

knowledge. The claim underlying Kuriyama’s book, and the question

moving the investigation presented in this article, is that the

relationship between sensory perception and language to describe it

presupposes a culture-specific attitude toward the senses. More

precisely, toward a hierarchy of the reliability of the senses as

instruments to get to know the world. Is this claim tenable? Can

linguistics help to cast some light on the problem? The following

pages sketch a possible answer to these questions.

2. The field of investigation: synaesthesia

To investigate the problem from the linguistic point of view, it is

necessary to find an area in which perception and language are tightly

linked. Synaesthetic expressions come to hand: they are all resolved in

expressing and defining sensory perceptions and, moreover, they

make different perceptual modalities merge. Synaesthesia, in fact,

connects different sensory realms: as is exemplified in the

Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics “Keats’ ‘heard melodies

are sweet’ evokes a clearly auditory concept (heard melodies) in terms



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belonging to the realm of taste (sweetness). The expression a cold

light is another example of a synesthetic metaphor. In this case, light,

which is linked to the visual domain, is defined in terms of coldness,

which belongs to the tactile domain.”

2.1 Theoretical premises

Synaesthesia will here be considered an instance of metaphor.

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind

of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003, p. 5): as

metaphor is a way of conceptualizing knowledge, so it is synaesthesia,

which focuses in particular on the understanding and construal of

perceptions. The source-and-target principle found to be at the basis of

metaphor according to the Lakoff and Johnson’s account (Lakoff and

Johnson, 2003) applies also to synaesthesia. Here, in fact, the role of

source and target elements are interpreted by sensory modalities: the

source modality is the one providing the quality of perception, while

the target modality is the modality which experiences the object to be

described. Take “sweet face”, “warm voice” or “sharp flavour”: one

feels sweetness with the sense of taste (source), but “sweet” is applied

to a visual perception, that is a face (target); as for the second

example, warmth is felt by the sense of touch (source), but here

“warm” comes to define the quality of a voice, which is an auditory

perception (target); “sharp flavour” combines touch (source) and taste

(target).



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3. Synaesthesia and its directionality: a path to cognitive and

perceptual universals?

One of the earliest studies which links findings about linguistic

synaesthesia with an arrangement of sensory modalities, is

Synaesthetic adjectives: a possible law of semantic change, by Joseph

Williams (Williams, 1976), in turn based on Stephen de Ullmann’s

studies on European poetry (de Ullmann,1945; Ullmann, 1951).

Williams investigates English sensory adjectives in a diachronic

perspective and reports that “sensory words in English have

systematically transferred from the physiologically least

differentiating, most evolutionary primitive sensory modalities to the

most differentiating, most advanced, but not vice versa” (Williams,

1976, p. 464-465). The physiology of senses appears in this quotation:

in a few words, the discourse shifts an historical lexical analysis to an

evaluation of perceptual possibilities of the human sensorium.

The distinction of the senses in “least / most differentiating” and

“primitive / advanced” implies a hierarchy of the perceptive efficacy

of senses: what should it be based on? As can be read in that paper,

the bases are the writings of Aristotle, Democritus, Aquinas, plus

descriptions of human phylogenesis and onthogenesis. Williams

briefly describes the account that the three philosophers give of human

sensorium as bearing the order sight-hearing-smell-taste-touch, then

the physiological sequence of maturation (measured in myelinization

of neural cortices) of the senses: tactile first, then olfactory, then either



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optic-acoustic or acoustic-optic. Subsequently, Williams suggests that

“some principle of sequential relationship might underlie not only

semantic change but other sensory systems as well” and that

“connections might exist among ontogeny, phylogeny, the

neurophysiology of sensation, cognition, and naming” (Williams,

1976, pp. 472, 473). Those claims are what makes William’s study

one of the bases of present investigation on synaesthesia (Cacciari,

2008, Shen and Aisenman, 2008, Brown and Anderson, 2006, p. 459,

Catricalà, 2008), but they are not completely sharable.

In fact, as a first point, the physiological development of senses

in itself does not prove anything related to a supposed hierarchy: on

the contrary, it could substantiate the opposite claim. In fact, if it is

true that there is a sense more important than the others, it would be

better that an infant has it perfectly active as soon as possible. Thus

this sense may be considered hierarchically the first, the one necessary

as a foundation for the further development of the organism. Hence, it

follows that touch should be first in the rank. As for the reference to

Aristotle, Democritus and Aquinas: their findings about human

sensorium may be biased by their inquiry for symmetry and order, by

their urgence to find in the Man a hierarchy that may recall the one

they were discovering in the Universe.1

1 Just to mention an example, in the tenth book of Confessions, by Aquinas, it is clear that speculation on senses is due to a reflection on the right path to follow for the human soul. In that book there is matter to hate each sense and make all of them in turn repulsive and inferior to the others.

Furthermore, the scientific

equipment these scholars could take advantage of was lacking of the



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machinery which now allows us to empirically test theories and

hypotheses on the human body and discover a much more about

human physiology and evolution.

We have no objection to the fact that with his schema Williams

pointed out a regularity of the semantic change in English, but it

seems reasonable to doubt the validity of the direct connection of it

with actual physiological facts: this is presented by the author himself

as a possibility and a suggestion for further investigation and

clarification (Williams, 1976, p. 472-473). In spite of that, the link

between semantic change and sensorial hierarchy has been taken as a

matter of fact and Williams summarizes his findings in the following

schema.

Figure 1: Metaphorical transfers among sensory modalities according

to Williams (Williams, 1976, p. 463).

This same figure is published at the beginning of many papers

and quoted as fundamental in various works (Shen and Aisenman,

2008; Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001a, b; Cacciari, 2008;

Catricalà, 2008) on the directionality of synaesthesia and on the

relationship among perceptual modalities: in doing this, the secondary



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sources have transformed the results of a study in the history of the

English language into an ultimate universal cognitive truth.

3.1 Controversial issues

Yeshayahu Shen and his co-workers believe in such a truth and

investigate synaesthesia in order to corroborate the validity of the

hierarchical relationship of the senses and of the directionality of

mapping. Their purpose is to apply William’s and Ullmann’s findings

to languages other than English. Therefore, part of their research is

devoted to Hebrew poetry and analyzes a corpus made of

contemporary poems (20th century). Shen proposes to a group of

informants a series of synaesthetic expressions following the mapping

proposed by Williams, paired with a synaesthesia with opposite

directionality: subjects read pairs of synaesthesias, “each pair

consisting of a metaphor extracted from a Hebrew poem (e.g., “a cold

light”) and a counterpart consisting of the same modalities but

reflecting the opposite directionality (“a lighted coldness”) (Shen,

1997, p. 51).

standard reversed A cold light

A sweet silence

A lighted coldness

A silent sweetness

Subjects are asked to indicate which are the synaesthesias they

find more natural and comprehensible and, lately, to recall them. The

result show that synaesthesias following the standard mapping are



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judged more comprehensible and they are also better recalled. The

findings in the Hebrew corpus are coherent with the hypothesis of a

directionality, confirming that directionality “reflects a preference for

a more ‘natural’ or ‘basic’ structure overits inverse” (Shen, 1997, p.

50).

A subsequent study, by Shen and Ravid Aisenman, on

synaesthesia in everyday Hebrew language (Shen and Aisenman,

2008), also takes into account the easiness of generation of contexts

for isolated synaesthesia. Expressions following standard mapping

result to be more easily included in a context generated on the spot

than the reversed expressions. What is the reason for the preference of

such a mapping? According to Shen’s and his co-workers’ approach,

the reason is cognitive and it operates through the same rules

governing metaphor: “Synaesthesia is but a special case of a cognitive

principle that applies to metaphors in general. The principle states:

Mapping from a more concrete concept onto a less concrete one is

more natural than the inverse. [...] Applying this general cognitive

principle to synaesthesia suggests that the concepts belonging to the

lower senses, such as touch and taste, are more ‘concrete’ (hence more

accessible) than those belonging to higher senses, such as sound and

sight” (Shen and Aisenman, 2008, p. 111).

The accessibility and concreteness of senses is considered a

property of the senses itself, so much that it spontaneously triggers the

arrangement of the senses in a hierarchy, and their distinction in

“lower” and “higher” senses.



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From such a perspective, the conclusion is that if a pattern is

preferred in synaesthesia, then it should be due to a principle intrinsic

to the nature of the senses. Considered that all human beings are

equipped with senses, it follows that such a hierarchical principle

relating sensory perceptions should be universally active. That is why

it is found active in English and Hebrew languages alike.

Is this the whole story? The directionality found in synaesthesia

in Hebrew mirrors the one found in English, true. However is this

enough to say that such a directionality is a universal cognitive fact,

governing the computation of sensory perception? Are findings based

on the analysis of a list of adjective-noun couplets conducted by small

groups of informants enough to declare the universality of a principle

governing human construal and communication of perception?

Perhaps it is not the case to establish such a universality.

Linguistic counterexamples to the hierarchy can be found as well, as is

illustrated below. There are studies on synaesthesia, in fact, which

come up with radically different descriptions of the relationship

among senses.

Maria Bretones Callejas analyzed synaesthesia in the works of

the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney (Nobel prize in Literature

1995, born in 1939). Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive account is the

theoretical framework of her work too, for which metaphor, therefore

synaesthesia, is a “cognitive device that allows us to think and

experience one thing in terms of another, thanks to the mapping of

conceptual structure from one mental domain to another” (Bretones



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Callejas, 2001, p. 1). Hence, she does not reject the directionality of

mapping from a more accessible modality to a less accessible, but

objects to the fact that this directionality must be universally

established and recurrent: according to her data, the choice of the

source and target modalities cannot be predicted on the basis of a

unique cognitive constraint.

Callejas analyzes synaesthetic expressions from fifty poems by

Heaney (e.g. coarse croacking, thick chorus, clean sound). She draws

a schema derived from all the types of mapping exhibited by Heaney’s

synaesthesias and the result is quite different from the one presented

on page 5.

Figure 2: Metaphorical transfers among sensory modalities in

Heaney’s poetry (Bretones Callejas, 2001, p. 10)

Callejas argues that accessibility is not a structural property of

the sense involved, as proposed by the followers of Williams’

schematization: “accessibility will function according to the meaning

intended or perceived, never according to more or less accessible

sensory modalities” (Bretones Callejas, 2001, p. 12). Accessibility of



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a sensory domain is thus linked to the meaning of the synaesthesia, to

the function of it in the discourse. In that, context is a primary variable

to be considered in order to assess the role of the sensory expression

in the synaesthesia.

Further, Callejas’ analysis is not restricted to couplets

“adjective-name”: English language offers more than the single option

“adjective-name” to express synaesthesia. Therefore, not only phrases

like clean new music and stony flavours are examined, but also I

savoured the rich crash (hearing is tasting), feeling our eyes on his

back (seeing is touching), inhale the absolute weather (feeling is

smelling). Studies like Shen and Aisenman’s restrict their analysis to

adjectival syntagms and systematically avoid analysis of context:2

2 “Note that expressions were artificially constructed by the authors, and were introduced to the participants as isolated or de-contextualized expressions [...]. The motivation for using isolated or de-contextualized expressions was that the potential influence of the context on the comprehension of those expressions would destroy the possibility of validity testing our hypothesis. This being said, it is clear that further research is needed that will test the exact influence of contextual factors on the comprehension of those expressions” (Shen and Aisenman, 2008, p. 120).

as

far as methodology is concerned, it can be objected that discarding

elements which may potentially influence the comprehension of an

expression, may compromise the comprehension itself. Thus, elements

marked as “not natural” in the study could have been perfectly

understood in a proper context. There is no need to remember that

natural linguistic expressions never occur with no context, but what

here matters most is that the principle of ad hoc categories on which

the analysis of these expressions rests (Shen, 1997, pp. 40, 56) is



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active only in the presence of a context which enables the construction

of a category: hence, ruling out the context may obliterate part of the

heuristic value of the study. Any attempt to ground results in an

alleged “naturalness” of the expression collapses if context (the

natural environment of language) is negated.

In fact, the results of Callejas’ study, which takes context into

account and considers the real conditions of production and

understanding of language, challenge the schematization driven by

analyses of data which ignore context. The crucial difference is that

Callejas places the very reason of the accessibility of a concept in the

context, the aspect that other studies discard. Moreover, she provides

evidence that directionality of mapping may not follow William’s

hierarchical generalization. Her approach to the sensory dimension is

such that all senses are vehicles of experience, at the same rank.

Callejas shows that many synaesthetic patterns are active in the

English language: experience constantly stimulates all senses and the

focus on one modality or on the other is chosen by the sensibility of

the subject. Any stimulation may echo responses in potentially all the

other modalities.

A broader analysis of the relationship between language and

sensory perception cannot disregard verbs. This is not the place to

investigate the issue thoroughly, but we make reference to a study

which contributes to clarify the wide range of patterns in expressing

sensorium that verbs in different languages may exhibit. If a unique

cognitive constraint was at the basis of conceiving perception, there



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should not be so much crosslinguistic variation, as it contrarily is. The

contribution comes from the work by B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano

(1999), who proposes an analysis of the sensorium starting from

polysemy of perception verbs in English, Basque and Spanish.

Ibarretxe points out how perception verbs can be distinguished

into three main groups definable as: verbs of experience, where the

reception of the stimulus is independent from the will of the

experiencer (e.g. Peter saw the birds); verbs of activity, where the

process of perception is consciously controlled by the experiencer

(e.g. Peter looked at the birds); verbs of percept or copulative, where

the subject of the verbs is the stimulus perceived (e.g. Peter looked

happy) (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 1999, p. 42-44). “Viberg (1984)

establishes the differences between experience and activity verbs on

the one hand and copulative verbs on the other, on the basis of what

he calls ‘base selection’, i.e. the choice of grammatical subject among

the deep semantic case roles associated with a certain verb. In the

former case, verbs are ‘experiencer-based’; that is to say the verb

takes an animate being with certain mental experience as a subject. In

the latter case, verbs are ‘source-based’ or ‘phenomenon-based’, as

the verb takes the experienced entity as a subject” (Ibarretxe-

Antuñano, 1999, pp. 44-45).

Experience and active perception verbs form a single macro-

group because they construe perception having the experiencer as

subject; copulative verbs are less focused on the experiencer. The role

of the experience is a key element in this kind of verbal analysis. In



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other words, the core of the linguistic analysis of perception lies in

understanding how language allows the construal of experience for the

person who is experiencing.

Comparing English, Spanish and Basque, the study focuses on

experience and activity verbs, because percept verbs, “unlike English,

are relatively poor in Spanish and almost non-existant in Basque”

(Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 1999, p. 53). On the basis of the same Viberg's

work, Ibarretxe reports that a possible schema for the lexicalization of

perception verbs could be such as follows:

sight > hearing > touch > smell/taste

Languages, therefore, could be classified on the basis of this

hierarchy, according to the number of senses they lexicalize. “For

instance, English has the five modalities: see, hear, feel, taste and

smell; Malay has four: lihat ‘vision’, dengar ‘hearing’, rasa ‘feel,

taste’ and hidu ‘smell’; Swedish has three: se ‘vision’, höra ‘hearing’

and känna ‘feel, taste, smell’” (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 1999, p. 74). The

hierarchy works as a sort of implication: if a language has the sense of

smell lexicalized, this entails that sight, hearing and touch are

lexicalized too. It is apparent that not all languages discriminate the

sensorium in five senses: as a consequence of this, any proposal to

ascertain the physiological relations among senses on a linguistic basis

must be taken cautiously.



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The Basque language lexicalizes sensorium in three areas,

seemingly sight hearing and touch: in reality, the term for touch in

Basque comes from the one for smell, contradicting the directionality.

“In the first group of experiencer verbs Basque has a lexical

item for every sense except for the sense of touch, where the verbs

sumatu and nabaritu are to be used. These verbs both mean ‘to

perceive’ and ‘to notice’. Although both verbs refer to general

perception, it is very interesting to notice that the verb sumatu is

related to the sense of smell. This verb comes from the noun suma,

which means ‘smell, sense of smell’” (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 1999, p.

47).

The meaning of the verb for ‘to perceive’ is related to the sense

of smell and it covers an area wider than it should be in Viberg’s

directionality: in fact, a term for all perceptions should not be allowed

to come from a “low” position. However, it happens, undermining the

unconditional validity of the hierarchy.

Basque is a language not amenable to schematizations in many

other senses. When Ibarretxe’s thesis presents a chapter on etymology

of English, Spanish and Basque verbs of perception, functional to the

study of polysemy, etymologies are reconstructed back to

Indoeuropean forms: even if the operation succeeds for English and

Spanish lexicon, Basque words do not comfortably fit in any family

picture with those roots. As Francisco Villar notes, there is no

language in the world which could be certainly considered of the same

genetic group as Basque. (Villar, 1997, p. 511). It is widely known



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that Basque is a non-Indoeuropean language, spoken by European

people living in a territory now limited to a small area in the north of

Pyrenees, across the border between Spain and France. Euskara (the

name of the Basque language in Basque) is spoken by a population

settled in that area since the Neolithic Age. Language changed in the

millennia, of course, and Basque people were attacked by other

populations in the prehistoric and the historic age. However, they were

never obliterated by the populations of Indoeuropean roots who

entered Europe starting from 4400 and 3400 b. C., then diffused in all

the continent during many subsequent waves of colonizations.

Therefore, Basque are the only direct descendants of European people

before Indoeuropeans. In their legends and folklore, traits of the

antique matriarcal and agricultural culture of Neolithic Europe still

survive.

Clearly, they underwent a long and slow indoeuropeization

process, due to the surrounding cultural environment, but their own

language and culture is still peculiar in Europe.

Such a picture may be useful to understand how a common

cultural heritage may unify languages that are normally considered

profoundly diverse. Our focus is precisely on the construal of

perceptions: many reasons to keep one sense above the other may

stem from a specific communal cultural background, far and wide, not

in the commonalities shared by all humans by the mere fact that they

are humans.



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It is apparent, then, that the question of a hierarchy of senses is

not solvable with a mere count of linguistic examples corresponding

to a hierarchy or another. With the analysis of language alone, it is not

possible to investigate the totality of a sensory experience, or to know

the precise relationship between the modalities with which the

experiencer is receiving the stimuli. Analysis of grammatical

structures, syntax, idioms, language change, may highlight aspects of

the way in which we give meaning to perceptions and how we direct

attention on aspects of the stimuli surrounding us, but it cannot

thorougly clarify reciprocal physiological and neurological

relationships among our senses. Mechanisms and functioning in

sensory organs, brain maps, hierarchies of bodily structures cannot be

derived from a linguistic research only. Therefore, a directionality of

mapping in simile and synaesthesia is not sufficient to entail a

hierarchy of value of the senses: there is more to be investigated

before one can assert this. The claim of a set of “lower” senses, with

scarce distinctiveness and a sort of dullness in perceiving, in contrast

to a “higher” set, smarter in detecting differences is somewhat

medieval and hardly tenable. In fact, distinctiveness and accessibility,

concreteness and immediateness seem to be properties of particular

ways of conceiving perceptions, not entailing a biological hierarchy of

the senses. The fact that a so-called “lower to higher” mapping is

found prevailing in many literatures and languages all over the world,

biases the reader to consider the alleged hierarchy as universal, valid

for all human communities, for all human beings, hence cognitive and



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biological. On the contrary, the idea that accessibility, concreteness,

“readiness” of a sense (as far as it can be detected by language) are

parameters to be assessed on a purely cultural scale, is to be put

forward. If a description of the reciprocal relation among senses has to

be done through the analysis of linguistic expressions, it must be

considered an instance of the cultural experience of the human being,

not a mirror of bodily functions or basic cognitive constraints.

4. Cultural aspects: the sensotype hypothesis

Languages show a high variability in the classification of

percepts (such as wider or narrower vocabularies for color names and

taste words or different sets of perception verbs) which nevertheless

does not compromise the overall ability to distinguish perceptions:

“there is no indication that the absence of a term implies an inability

to discriminate” (Goody, 2002, p. 18). The analysis of such

differences, all stemming from the same basic physiological

perceptual ability in humans, is the approach pursued by the so called

anthropology of the senses, which studies sensorial perceptions in the

different cultures and the complex of values and meanings attributed

to them.

As Vincenzo Matera states, in fact, sensoriality is socially

conditioned: the assignment of meaning to what is perceived, can be

done only under the influence of social and cultural elements which

combine to bring about the significance of the sensory experience:



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“a man in isolation – thesis implicitly but never overtly formulated by

many scholars, beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure – cannot

produce meaning. The ability of producing meanings and, for what we

are concerned with, of developing a sensoriality (i.e. a meaningful

perception) grows and takes place in the individual only in virtue of

his belonging to a collectivity, in the context of the socialization

process” (Matera, 2002, p. 10)3

.

The sensorial articulation and the relationship among senses,

being a cultural fact, is not identical in all societies (Matera, 2002, p.

15): Jack Goody (Goody, 2002), points out that not only may the

reciprocal relation among the five senses vary, but also that the

distinction of senses in the five abilities of sight, hearing, touch, taste,

smell is not universally diffused.4

Following this approach Walter Ong suggests: “it is useful to

think of cultures in terms of the organization of sensorium. [...] The

differences in cultures which we have just suggested can be thought of

Also, the reliability accorded to

perception in a sense or another is determined by cultural biases.

3 Original version: “un uomo in solitudine – tesi implicita anche se mai formulata con chiarezza da molti studiosi a cominciare da Ferdinand de Saussure – non può produrre significato. La capacità di produrre senso e, per la prospettiva che qui ci interessa, di sviluppare una sensorialità (vale a dire, una percezione dotata di senso) cresce e si installa nell’individuo solo grazie alla sua appartenenza a una collettività, nell'ambito del processo di socializzazione”. 4 Europe and Asia are the areas in which the five-part conceptualization is more widespread, but there are cases in Africa for which this does not hold (see, for instance, the Hausa language, which employs just two verbs of perception – Ritchie, 1991).



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as differences in the sensorium, the organization of which is in part

determined by culture while at the same time it makes culture. [...]

Man’s sensory perceptions are abundant and overwhelming. He

cannot attend to them all at once. In great part a given culture teaches

him one or another way of productive specialization. It brings him to

organize his sensorium by attending to some types of perceptions

more than others, by making an issue of certain ones while relatively

neglecting other ones” (Ong, 1991, pp. 28-29).

With “sensorium”, Ong means the entire sensory apparatus, plus

the values and the meanings ascribed to it by the various cultures. A

sort of culturally defined frame of perception, inside which all

personal sensory experiences find place and shape.

Working in this perspective, Mallory Wober proposes a

framework called “the sensotype hypothesis”, based on the idea that

“the prevailing patterns of childhood intake and proliferation of

information from the various sense modalities differ according to

culture” (Wober, 1991, p. 33). These words harmonize with those of

Ong: “In great part a given culture teaches <the child> one or another

way of productive specialization. It brings him to organize his

sensorium by attending to some types of perception more than others,

by making an issue of certain ones while relatively neglecting other

ones” (Ong, 1991, p. 28).

With “sensotype”, then, a particular configuation of relationship

among senses is intended, a culturally determined pattern in treating



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information coming from the different modalities and a consequent

culture-specific way of attending and responding to it.

4.1 Can a word be coloured?

The “sensotype hypothesis” proposed by Wober calls to

reconsider the role of senses in psychological tests. Psycholinguistics

also makes use of perceptual tests to assess performances related to

the functioning of language in the mind. One of the most famous and

widely practised tests is the so-called Stroop test. Bearing in mind

Wober’s hypothesis for which subjects respond to tasks according to

their specific sensotype, it is worth saying some words about this test.

John Ridley Stroop published a psycholinguistic landmark

article on selective attention and interference, based on the speed of

reading colour words and naming colours (Stroop, 1935). The material

for the tests are cards with colour words or squares of solid colours.

Control stimuli were colour names written in black ink5

5 Black is considered as a “non-colour”, an unmarked hue, due to its being the most common ink used in text printing.

and the

coloured squares. Experimental stimuli were colour words printed in

coloured ink, not matching the meaning of the word: for instance, the

word GREEN is printed in red ink, or the word ORANGE is printed in

blue. The experiments ran by Stroop were three, but the most famous

are the first two: in the first one, subjects had to read aloud the black

words (control situation), then read the coloured words printed in

incongruent ink; in the second one, subjects had to name the colour of

a series of coloured squares (control situation), then name the colour



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of the ink of the colour-incongruent printed words. The subjects took

considerably longer to name the colour of the ink of a colour-word

(printed in a mismatching colour) than the squares, making evident an

interference of the meaning of the written word in the selection of

attention. The mismatch between the perceived information (the actual

colour of the ink) and the conceptual information (the colour

conveyed by the meaning of the word) interferes with the selection of

the proper stimulus to give voice to. In the third experiment, subjects

were trained for eight days to name ink colours of incompatible

words: they got a better result than in the pre-test without training (i.e.

they were more accurate and fast in saying the right colour, not

confused by the contrasting meaning of the word). With this, Stroop

demonstrated that experience influences the ability of directing

selective attention.

The efficacy of the Stroop test to investigate the field of

selective attention has been proved by more than 60 years of studies in

psycholinguistics based on it or on modified versions for special

purposes (MacLeod, 1991).

The applicability of the Stroop test presupposes subjects with

mastery in reading and in colour naming. For its structure, the test is

basically a visual one, connected to language via colour lexicon.

Stroop chose subject vision as a route to their mind and to their way of

selecting information during perception. He could, we suppose, have

equally considered the readiness in naming the source of a sound

when the subject sees a violin but hears a trumpet, compared to when



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the subject just hears the voice of an instrument and has to name it.

But he chose vision, with colours and written words. Any researcher,

as a human being, is a member of a particular culture: hence bears the

sensotype specific for that culture. That is, the researcher is more

skilled in those senses his sensotype values most. Some of the

researcher’s senses would prevail as a vehicle of intake of information

(to say it with Wober), according to the organization of the sensorium

he has learnt to be the most productive for intellectual purposes (Ong,

1991, p. 28). It is natural that he projects onto his fellow human beings

the same sensory organization he perceives active on himself,

therefore creating tests according to this. We believe that the choice of

a visual and reading test is partly due to the sensotype of Stroop

himself and of his operating in a culture where vision is considered the

prototypical vehicle in acquiring information from the environment,

and where literacy and colour names are given as a basic endowment

of almost everyone. However, persons from other cultures may be

bearers of different sensotypes: they may have been taught to organize

their sensorium in a different way, their balance of skills among the

senses may not be analogue to the one of the researcher.

Further, the relevance of perceptual characteristics in a single

modality may be profoundly diverse: in the field of vision all human

beings detect the same spectrum of colours (all the wavelengths of the

visible light), but different languages do not segment and label it in

the same way (one of the latest studies about this topic is Mitterer et

al., 2009).



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Gizey people (living in North Camerun) use colour words

mainly to specify domestic animals and liquids, as Roberto Ajello

reports. A limited system includes general terms that can be assigned

to any type of referent (Ajello, 2007). On the other hand the specific

colours for domestic animals are around twenty, accounting for the

different hues and patterns of the coat of sheep, cows and goats. These

terms allow a precise description of each head, to make each single

animal clearly identifiable. Gizey economy and social organization, in

fact, is based on the possession and breeding of domestic animals:

mostly cows, then goats and sheep, have a high functional importance

in Gizey culture. Therefore their colour is a highly salient property

and must be expressed clearly.

On the contrary, the colour of plants, environmental elements,

and manufacts is not relevant. Describing those objects focusing on

their colour is not a linguistic practice in Gizey. It is useless to denote

the colour, because it is there, existing in the situational context,

glaringly obvious and predictable.

It is not a variable that is necessary to distinguish one element

from the other. As for plants, features such as the structure and the

characteristics which make them edible or not are relevant, not their

nuances of green. As for objects, colour is not a salient feature to

identify an item among others.

A series of objects which differ only in colour is a consequence

of high technology and industrial production: clothes, furniture, house

paintings, and so on are produced in identical series, differing



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exclusively in colour. Hence it follows that colour, in a society with a

technology for serial production, has a high saliency in the process of

identifying objects, hence it is a property that selects speakers’

attention.6

In a traditional economy as the Gizey’s, where technology is

extremely simple, features of manufacts are predictable by the

material in which they are realized, as predictable are the hues of

environmental elements, which do not need to be distinguished by

colour. A cup is a cup, a bush is a bush, no matter the colour. Colour

for objects is not a salient perceptual property in Gizey culture.

In North-Camerun, the schooling system speaks French:

therefore a Gizey who goes to school learns the French terms for

colours and the way they work in French. Still, their conceptual

mastery of colour is traditional. As Ajello reports: “a high school

student’s answer to my question on the colour of grass is emblematic

‘But what is the colour of grass? Grass is grass, it has no colour. The

colour is vert, I don’t know, I’ve got to ask to my grandfather’ (Ajello,

2007).7

In such a context, would a Stroop test be conceivable? Would

the instruction ‘name the colour of this word’ make much sense for a

Gizey, given that for him there is no point in describing the colour of a

series of graphic signs? The linking of colour perception and language

6 This phenomenon is also pointed out by Maria Grossmann, with particular reference to the production of artificial colours (Grossmann, 1988, pp. 5, 6). 7 Original text: “La risposta di uno studente di liceo alla mia domanda sul colore dell’erba è emblematica: ‘Ma di che colore è l’erba? L’erba è erba, non ha colore. Il colore è vert, non so, bisogna chiedere a mio nonno’”.



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in Gizey is a sample of how peculiar the connection could be, creating

a system incompatible with the one westerners are used to, which is

focused on completely different referents and parameters of variation.

When we are conscious of the fact that the relationship between

colour and words is valid for every language in a different way, and

that the relationship between colours and objects is a purely cultural

fact, how do we interpret the data coming from a Stroop test? Reading

is a culture-specific ability, and naming colours too. Having said that,

what is the scope of the research stemming from Stroop tests?

Two are the hypotheses.

One: it uses reading, colour naming and reciprocal interferences

as a linguistic activity easy to be tested, in order to gather a series of

data upon which to draw psychological models of lexical access and

meaning processing in human mind. It is performed in a particular

condition of literacy and chromonimy just for practical reasons, but

general results can be extended farther.

Two: it uses reading, colour naming and reciprocal interferences

as a linguistic activity easy to be tested, in order to gather a series of

data upon which to draw psychological models of lexical access

during reading and colour naming in cultures that make use of written

language and have a colour system adequate to the test.

It would be interesting to carry out further research to determine

which of the hypotheses is correct. In doing this, psycholinguistics and

field linguistics should cooperate in order to benefit each of the

experience and frameworks of the other. At the same time, emphasis



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on vision and colour must not distract from the analysis of other

perceptual systems and their linguistic representation: researchers

should be aware of the social constuction of perception they are

moving from, not to let it bias the research they are carrying on. As

David Howes provocatorily declares, “scholars like Berlin and Kay

(1969), who focus exclusively on the comparison of colour

terminologies, never thinking to compare odour, or taste vocabularies,

have plainly failed to transcend our culture’s sensory biases” (Howes,

1991, p. 172).

5. Synaesthesia and sensotype: a matter of taste

The analysis of synaesthesia is entirely based on sensory

vocabulary, therefore “our culture’s sensory biases” may be subtly

active in directing our interpretation of data. The sensotype

hypothesis may provide the research on synaesthetic expressions with

a further perspective, that could be profitable in the analysis of

problematic cases. To propose an application of this, two studies about

sensory perception in Indonesia are confronted in this section: they

touch similar issues and they both find problematic points dealing

with the sense of taste. One is a linguistic study, on directionality

principle in synaesthetic metaphors in Indonesian (Shen and Gil,

2008). The other is an anthropological study on Weyéwa, a population

living in Sumba, Indonesia and about the role of taste and taste words

in the social interaction (Kuipers, 1991).



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5.1 Sweet fragrance from Indonesia

Shen and Gil’s study starts out with a synaesthesia used as a

name for a supermarket in the town of Pontianak, Indonesia: harum

manis, i.e. sweet fragrance. Could it have been manis harum, i.e.

fragrant sweetness?, the authors ask themselves. The directionality

principle they hypothesize makes them inclined to say no (Shen and

Gil, 2008).

They conduct a survey on Indonesian with a method similar to

the one applied to Hebrew in previous studies: but the procedure of

composing “direct” and “reversed” synaesthesias and of making

native speakers judge the appropriateness of the expression is a false

start. In fact, to find a native speaker of Indonesian is not easy:

“nobody speaks Standard Indonesian as their first native language;

children acquiring Indonesian start out with one or more varieties of

colloquial Indonesian, and only later acquire the standard language”

(Shen and Gil, 2008). Speakers continuously move between acrolect

and basilect and it is not possible to say which is the variety in which

subjects process the de-contextualized submitted stimuli: hence it is

not completely clear what dialect exactly has been investigated, and

what the parameters of variation are taken into account by the study.

Secondly, the method of analyzing adjective-noun couplets does not

work. The Indonesian subjects judge expressions with various

syntactic structures, because a single way for expressing syneasthesia

is felt as not appropriate in Indonesian language for all modality



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pairings. It is apparent that dealing with different typologies of

languages rules out the possibility of working only with adjectival

phrases, confirming the validity of the approaches in which

synaesthesia is investigated in a wider range of grammatical

constructions.

Indonesia has been chosen as an instance of completely different

cultural and linguistic context from the ones considered so far: a

success of the directionality principle there would be a further

confirmation of its universal validity. As a base for their research, the

authors take a corpus of written texts collected from the internet.

However, this choice seems to contradict the yearning for otherness

they call for: in fact, internet texts (which involve possession or usage

of a computer, access to the net and aquaintance with a style of

communication according to its standards) are produced by people and

for people with an education and cultural background that can be

assimilated to the one of western culture. This may not influence the

language structure in itself, but surely affects communicative modality

towards a certain uniformity: consequently, some synaesthetic

expressions, even if coming from South East Asia, could be modelled

on western patterns.8

If, as we claim, a study on synaesthesia cannot be limited to a

narrow analysis of language structures, the context of expressions and

the macrocontext of the text is highly relevant. Therefore, can a

survey in a context such as the internet, however Indonesian, be truly

8 See the promotional text for a new line of make-up quoted in the article.



138

considered conducted on a completely “exotic” material? We cast

doubt on this. As a result of this seminal experiment conducted on

acceptability of synaesthetic metaphors extracted by the internet

corpus, Shen and Gil find tendencies that seem to confirm the validity

of the directionality principle, “nevertheless, the results of the

experiment show considerable variation from one stimulus to another,

for which we do not expect to be able to come up with a single unified

explanation. Each word and each pair of words has its own story, its

own idiosyncratic features, which affect the way in which it is judged

by the experimental subjects” (Shen and Gil, 2008).

The authors admit that it is not so easy to reconduct all

synaesthetic expressions to a precise pattern: a discrepancy with the

standard of the directionality principle is in fact observed. The reason

for this is supposed to be linked with the degree of acceptability

shown by certain forms due to their higher or lower frequency.

Conventional and frequent expressions are said to be more consistent

with the expected pattern. The authors claim that having a sample of

synaesthesias more homogeneous as for frequency, hence for

acceptability, would have provided results more consistent with the

directionality principle. But it seems that there are not synaesthetic

expressions of the same frequency that can cover all the modality

pairings to be investigated. Therefore an optimal experimental

condition to demonstrate the validity of the directionality principle is

not to be given.



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If the tendency in experiments is to base them on homogeneous

stimuli to get homogeneous responses, what is the heuristic value of

such experiments? If the basis on which data are discarded is the non-

conformity to the hypothesis the data should test, what do experiments

really test? This question is particularly relevant because studies such

as Shen and Gil’s aim to find universal cognitive principles, valid

anywhere, any time: but it seems that in looking for this universality,

they rule out what they cannot account for, labelling it as

idiosyncratic. Such “idiosyncrasies”, as we have seen for Basque

semantic shift and Heaney’s poetry, are not included in the coverage

of the universal principle (thus, they implicity declare the non-

universality of the principle itself). They are just thrown on the scrap

heap and rarely used as starting point to broaden the horizon and

reformulate the principles, to adapt them to an account which may

contemplate the existence of such a heap.

To be honest, Shen and Gil in some way perceive the

inadequacy of data collected only by means of such experiments, so

they try to re-tool their analysis taking the everyday life experience

into account, with the specificity of Indonesian culture. Consequently,

they base a following analysis on a corpus of natural speech the MPI

Jakarta Child Language Corpus (JCLC).

This corpus should provide “a more faithful reflection of the

range of linguistic phenomena to which ordinary speakers of

Indonesian are exposed in the course of their everyday lives, and



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which might, accordingly, impinge on their performance as

experimental subjects” (Shen and Gil, 2008).

After analysis, data from the JCLC show instances of

synaesthetic metaphors in line with the directionality principle, but

counterexamples as well. The most problematic case involves the

sense of taste. There are tokens, in fact, which report synaesthetic

expressions associating tastes and colours, overtly violating the

directionality principle. Data about taste were also the most diffcult to

reduce to directionality schema in experimental task. The question is

open: “frequency in naturalistic speech may be an additional factor

governing subjects’ judgments of naturalness in the experimental task.

However, this leaves unanswered the question of why, in both the

MPI Jakarta Child Language Corpus and the experimental study,

combinations of rasa [taste] and a colour term, as in stimulus 5 [type

sight-taste], form synaesthetic metaphors in violation of the

Directionality Principle. A possible answer to this question is provided

by Viberg (1984), who shows that the principles governing

synaesthetic metaphors are different for verbs than they are for other

parts of speech” (Shen and Gil, 2008).

The ways proposed to solve the problem are: investigating

frequency and precising which part of speech rasa exactly is. Both

ways may be fruitful, and may lead to satisfactory solutions.

Nevertheless, we suggest to include in the solving process a

further perspective, that is trying an evaluation of the Indonesian

sensotype. As Sean Day suggests in the paper Synaesthesia and



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Synaesthetic Metaphors “linguistic aspects per se of metaphors are to

be chiefly found in the realm of semantics and necessitate a re-

analysis and re-working of the lexicon. However, the information and

models for this re-tooling are chiefly to be found outside of linguistics

proper. [. . . ] Rules for putting two or more items [.. . ] together in an

association are not universal [.. . ]. Rather, they vary radically from

culture to culture. Thus, in order to approach the investigation of

metaphors as a whole, we must first start out by breaking things up so

that we may look at their specific cultures and their distinct

organization and emerging rules for a particular set of metaphor. The

field of anthropology has already supplied us with a rich collection of

data” (Day, 1996).

5.2 Weyéwa and taste

The field of anthropology provides us with data on taste in the

Indonesian area. It has been seen that taste seems not to fit into the

directionality schema: could this be due to a particular role of taste in

the Indonesian culture and related sensotype? In trying to answer this

question we propose a reading of the article of Kuipers about

Weyéwa. This is not to say that Jakarta inhabitants are the same as

Weyéwa people, but just to put forward the idea that in the population

of the Indonesian area a different sensotype, if compared to a western

one, may be active, with a peculiar cultural hierarchy of senses and a

specific linguistic representation of them. The Weyéwa case is only an

example and further research should be carried out to ascertain the



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major sensotypes active in Indonesia and their relationship with

language.

Weyéwa live in Sumba, about 250 miles East of Bali and this

island “has experienced relatively few externally imposed changes to

the traditional ways of life of its 400,000 or so inhabitants” (Kuipers,

1991, p. 113). Weyéwa still rely on their own gardens and livestock

for food: therefore, their traditional diet has undergone few changes

(and the most significant western elements in the daily food are coffee

and refined sugar) and, like diet, the social role of food and of the

sequence of tastes is still unchanged. As Kuipers reports, in fact, “In

any Weyéwa social encounter between same-sex age-mates that lasts

for more than a few seconds, small, shoulder-slung baskets of

ingredients for a betel and areca nut chew are obligatorily exchanged”

(Kuipers, 1991, p. 114).

The host who wants to honour his guest would provide him with

abundant good quality betel and areca nuts, which are kept in a basket,

with a semi-secret interior fold, called ndáppeta containing the best

choice fruits: the closer the relationship between guest and host, the

better the guest knows how to reach the ndáppeta inside the basket.

Betel and areca are usually enjoyed in the veranda of the house. The

following lines show how both taste of food and access to it have a

crucial social significance: “I heard the story of a presumptuous young

man who was badly rebuffed by the father of the girl he was courting

when, in a rather premature effort to establish his intimacy with the

family, he reached for the innermost fold of the elder man’s betel



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basket and popped into his mouth what turned out to be some very

tough-tasting old maládi [a harsh variety of areca]. Since the ndáppeta

folds usually contain the choice ingredients, he soon realized the

hostile significance of this clearly intentional sign” (Kuipers, 1991, p.

115).

Betel and areca have a dominant tart and pungent taste: if the

encounter proceeds, it requires something sweet, like coconut juice or

heavily sugared hot coffee. If the guest stays longer for a meal, the

food is served into the house after the coffee or the coconut. Starch

staples constitute the core of the meal and they are served

accompanied by a number of condiments and small bowls of salt and

crushed chilis. At this stage, saltiness and pungent tastes are the most

prominent, but if the meal becomes special or formal, more sweet

sauces are served. However, even if sweet, flavours are intense,

because mildness and blandness are always considered negatively, as

a signal of scarce respect for the guest or as an evidence of poverty of

the host.9

When describing Weyéwa food and taste sequence, the matter

gets highly complex. In fact, tastes are labelled by “narrowly defined,

non-lexemic, object-bound terms”: Kuipers reports that his assistants

were not able to place the flavour of mint within any particular

category, and the sensation was described with something that, if

translated, sounds as “it has the taste of the mint plant” (Kuipers,

1991, p. 118). Some terms can be used in association only with

9 Blandness is only appreciated in a mouth-rinsing water which may be provided before and after the meal.



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specific kinds of foods, and Kuipers is surprised to hear from recorded

conversations “how rare it was for a taste word to be used without

some kind of intensifier” (Kuipers, 1991, p. 120). Moreover, terms

which can be grouped in the field of taste words sometimes refer to

complex sensations involving not only flavour, but also temperature,

texture, smell of the food, hence describing a combination of

multimodal experiences. Further, a peculiarity of taste words in

Weyéwa is to bear a situational markedness: in fact, during a social

visit, food evaluation is at issue, but loud comments or description of

it are not allowed. Discussing the taste qualities of food is impolite

and it may be offensive for the host: if it is done, it causes heavy

social implications. Comments on food are appropriate only later on,

“out of the earshot of the host” (Kuipers, 1991, p. 121), in situations

when taste is not at issue as a direct component of the interaction.

From this context, it emerges that an evaluation of the linguistic

phenomenology of taste cannot be only confined to an analysis of

portions of sentences. Situational context is relevant too (see the sort

of ban on food-talking while eating) and peculiar patterns of use (e.g.

association with intensifiers) cannot be discarded in accounting for the

expression of taste quality. Before attempting a study of taste

associated with other domains, then, taste itself has to be investigated

deeply. It seems particularly inappropriate not to consider the

culturally defined taste categories shared by the community. As a

proposal for further metodological investigation, Kuipers concludes

the report on Weyéwa noticing that “it remains an interesting



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comparative question to what degree pure, abstracted context-free

referential relations characterize linguistic representations of sensory

experience” (Kuipers, 1991, p. 125).

Synaesthesia is an example of linguistic representation of

sensory experience: in investigating it, context (both textual and

situational) cannot be neglected. It may pique interest that most

difficulties in the linguistic analysis in Indonesian show up when the

domain of taste is investigated: perhaps this is linked to a peculiar

conception of the taste in the Indonesian area, of which an example is

provided by the Weyéwa people. The role of taste in this traditional

community in Indonesia reminds us of the existence of sensotypes: it

may be fruitful to root in the specific cultural relationship among

senses the evaluation of the relationship among sense words.

6. A glance at neurology

Suggestions confirming the absence of a predetermined pattern

in combining sensory perceptions come from neurology too. The

environment normally generates stimuli which elicit a simultaneous

response in more than one modality: a food can be seen, touched,

smelt and tasted at the same time, a lowering of temperature may be

paired with a change in sunlight, or with the sound of a sudden wind,

and so on with coupling and grouping of perceptions. A line of

research in the combination and integration of modalities is being

carried out in the Max Planck Institute of Tübingen, Germany, by



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Marc O. Ernst and his group (Ernst and Bülthoff, 2004). The main

tenet of the theory underlying their work is that information gained

through perception is integrated with prior knowledge to allow an

action on the environment. The percept is constituted by the merging

of multiple modality sources: the integration of the signals is operated

according to a strategy elaborated for the situation. The account of

perception is given in probabilistic terms: that is to say, our brain

cannot produce but subsequent hypotheses on the tridimensional

environment, collecting information from all the available sources and

picking out the most likely estimate of what is going on. An example

is the phenomenon that can be experienced travelling by train. We are

sitting on the train, stopped at the station, and we are looking out of

the window. From our point of view we cannot see anything but

another train, standing on the track immediately beside us. Suddenly

that train starts moving. Or maybe not? “In either case the brain will

come up with a unique ‘right or wrong’ answer to this ambiguous

situation. If the brain is wrong the illusory self-motion is noticed

either when looking out of another window or when a different

sensory modality such as the vestibular system disambiguates the

situation. That is, the brain collects more and more information about

the perceptual event and finally resolves the ambiguity” (Ernst and

Bülthoff, 2004, p. 162). The senses cooperate to disambiguate

perceptions and to get the most reliable estimate on the state of the

environment. For example, an object can be recognized both visually

and haptically: being the viewpoint usually frontal to the object, vision



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provides the map for the visible side of an object, while touch (given

that hands can reach the back of the object) produces the map for the

other side of it and for features not detectable by vision (e.g.

temperature and texture), integrating the information about the object

(Newell et al., 2001). The model used by Ernst’s group considers that

for specific goals there can be modalities more appropriate and precise

to rely on. A recent experimental study by this group (Bresciani et al.,

2006) reports interesting findings on the integration of perceptions of

visual and tactile events. The experiments consist in various sessions,

when visual and tactile stimuli are presented to the subjects. The task

for the subjects is to count the received stimuli, either a flashing light

or a tap on the arm. The experimental situation is the somministration

of the combined stimuli, to calculate the relative reliability of each

sense depending on the task requested: in fact, in the case of

simultaneous presentation of combined stimuli, subjects are instructed

to react only to the flashes in a trial, and only to the tap on the arm in a

second trial. Consequently, each one of the two senses is in turn

receptor of a background or of a foreground stimulus. Subjects must

push a key on a keypad when they detect the task-relevant stimulus.

When combined, the stimuli are presented in equal number or with

discrepancy (one more or one less stimulus in the background

modality) to allow the measuring of influence of the backgrounded

sense in the response to the detection of stimuli. Results show that

signals are always combined, being the perceived number of flashes

(or taps) systematically increased or decreased when more or less taps



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(or flashes) were presented (Bresciani et al., 2006, p. 559). This is

considered to be an automatic combination operated by the central

nervous system, which tends to combine signals considered to

originate from the same physical event (taps and flashes occurring

almost always together), integrating multimodal signals.10

10 What we call ‘optical’ or ‘acoustic’ illusions, such as the so called McGurk effect (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976), are operations by which our CNS integrates inputs to arrange a naturally plausible perception. We cannot forget that our biological machine evolved in a natural environment, providing us with effective means to understand the world and survive. When our prehistoric ancestors inhabited the world, a voice from a face always comes from that face, not from a sound track matched with an inconsistent video image.

The two

modalities influence one another, following a principle of consistency:

focusing on a modality increases the attention towards a type of

stimuli, but it does not obliterate the response of the other. The

reliability of each sense is increased or diminished according to the

task to be performed: the foregrounding or the backgrounding of the

modality is due to task instruction. Neither of the two modalities show

hierarchical predominance or higher accuracy and distinctiveness. The

intention of accomplishing a task, the attention as obedience to a

command, all of these shaped the behavior of the subject. In a lab, we

would say, not only a subministration of stimuli has been recreated,

but a social environment of dominance and accomplishment, as well

as cooperation between subjects and experimenter, rules of behavior

to learn, and the use of language to transmit all of this. In a nutshell,

this is what happens to people when they grow up in the social

environment surrounding them, which makes them learn a specific



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language, shows patterns of behavior, assigns them a role and a belief

on what they are supposed to do, stimulates their interest toward some

perceptions suggesting how to shift between modalities to better

attend a complex stimulus. All of these factors result in particular

outcomes of perceptual activity and relationships between senses that

are peculiar to each culture, which are partly mirrored by language.

At the same time, as in the experiments shown, the

backgrounded modalities do have a role in perception: if stimulated,

they cannot be totally obliterated by the instructions provided, or by

the more frequent experiences the subject takes part in. Out of the lab,

this means that even if a particular perceptual pattern and a

relationship between modalities seem more broadly diffused and more

easily detectable, other patterns and relationships are not completely

absent.

Other studies on neural structures underlying perception

(Barsalou, 2008; Pietrini et al., 2004; Ricciardi et al., 2009) show that

experience, possible actions and learning, all of them act as modifiers

of neural pattern activations. Human environment is not only the

physical world, but the cultural one as well, with all the assumptions,

beliefs and attitudes it brings towards reality, in large part conveyed

through language.

“What we call ‘direct physical experience’ is never merely a

matter of having a body of a certain sort: rather, every experience

takes place within a vast background of cultural presuppositions. It

can be misleading, therefore, to speak of direct physical experience



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which we then ‘interpret’ in terms of our conceptual system. Cultural

assumptions, values and attitudes are not a conceptual overlay which

we may or may not place upon experience as we choose. It would be

more correct to say that all experience is cultural through and through,

that we experience our ‘world’ in such a way that our culture is

already present in the very experience itself” (Lakoff and Johnson,

2003, p. 57).

7. Concluding remarks

The study of linguistic synaesthesia is a valuable approach in

clarifying the relationship among the different sensory modalities.

Studies focused on precise features of synaesthesia, such as recurrent

combinations of the sensory modalities and comprehensibility of

expressions, have correctly pointed out a regularity in the construction

and interpretation of synaesthetic expressions in many languages.

However, their analysis crosses out the context and reduces the

analysis of synaesthetic expressions to adjective-noun couplets:

therefore only a partial evaluation of the phenomenon is given. Other

syntactical options to express synaesthesia are discarded, and the

contribution to the meaning of the expression given by the context is

disregarded.

Nevertheless, the studies extend in a universal perspective their

findings, proposing that the directionality and the preferred patterns

they have identified in synaesthesia are a reflection of cognitive



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constraints. They make the directionality of synaesthesia overlap with

the directionality of metaphor, henceforth claiming for it the same

universality attributed to the metaphor principles. Moreover, because

the findings they came up with involve sensory perception, they

implicitly postulate a cognitive hierarchy of senses which mirrors the

relations found in language. The crucial controversial point is

precisely here: such a directionality and hierarchy could not be

universally tenable. In fact, there are counterexamples to this

directionality and hierarchy. These are found in various languages,

and in various types of syntactic constructions. This means that the

studies which claim a universality for a sensory hierarchy have failed

to investigate linguistic expressions and contexts which demonstrate a

more elastic connection between different sensory modalities.

However, the studies which admit a more free pattern do not claim a

total indeterminacy of the directionality: in fact, grounding their

observations in the cognitive account of metaphor, they keep intact the

postulate of the mapping from a more salient source to a less salient

target, and allow variability only at the level of the choice of the

source and target modalities.

Apparently, this approach is more in accord with findings in

other disciplines, such as neurology and anthropology. As for

neurology, there are documented influences of experience in shaping

the brain circuitry and the organization of the systems deputed to the

comprehension and interpretation of sensory inputs (Ernst and

Bülthoff, 2004; Maravita and Iriki, 2004; Recanzone, 1999; Ricciardi



152

et al., 2009; Sirois et al., 2008). Anthropology has found that the

senses are considered in the various societies with peculiar hierarchies

of values and they are variously trained according to the necessities

which that society believes to be primary (Howes, 1991; Goody, 2002;

Gusman, 2004; Matera, 2002; Ritchie, 1991). Therefore the

organizations of the sensorium is the most disparate across societies.

As a result of this, expressions and structures mirroring the

particular sensotype of a society can be found in language. Even if

there may be correspondences of the hierarchy of the sensorium in

different societies, therefore in different languages, this does not mean

that a single hierarchy must be shared across the entire human

community.11

In conclusion, an answer to the question of the beginning

emerges. Yes, a hierarchy of senses does make sense, but other

hierarchies of senses make sense too. The point is that a unique

hierarchy active in all human communities does not exist but each

community shares a hierarchy of senses and a way of dealing with

perceptions adequate to its necessities. At the same time all persons in

the community foreground or background their attention to the single

modalities according to the special task they have to accomplish and

to the sensotype they have learnt to be most effective. It follows that

11 Particularly, the existence of different sensotypes active in different societies risks to bias the premises and the interpretation of the results of studies on perception. In fact researchers themselves bear a specific organization of sensorium which may lead them to design and administer tests which focus on some sensory modalities more than on others for reasons not due to the necessity of the study but to the hierarchy of senses which the researchers are trained to work.



153

the investigation of sensory hierarchies as they emerge from language

is interesting and necessary to be pursued, because it can reveal much

of how perception is construed and communicated. However,

linguistics alone is not enough to investigate the reasons for the

creation of a sensorial hierarchy and the reasons for the patterns of

variation of hierarchies. Therefore, findings in linguistics in the field

of perception must be related and supported by parallel findings in

neurology and anthropology, if a complete understanding of the matter

is to be pursued.

Sara Ricci

[email protected]

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