Did you ever wonder if people who live in different environments think of landscape concepts in similar ways? In a recent post, I discussed how difficult it is to define a forest. So, can we even think of translations of landscape terms as referring to similar concepts? Due to their different experiences, we may expect Swiss mountain valley dwellers to think very differently of mountains, hills and valleys than someone who spends his life in the UK.
Together with Ross Purves and Asifa Majid, I studied the meaning of English, French and German landscape terms. In a nutshell, we found that speakers of the same language think in similar ways about landscape. In comparison, speakers of different languages diverged in some respects in their evaluations of landscape terms. You can find the full article here.
How to measure meaning?
It is intuitively obvious that speakers of different languages may have different mental representations of landscape objects like mountains and hills. However, it is less obvious how to measure these differences with a scientific method. In the 1950s, psychologists came up with methods and determined some very basic scales that can be used to rate concepts (see Osgood et al. 1957).
Embodiment: Our mind is based on our body
These methods are based on the fact that we, as human animals with similar body shapes and perceptual organs, experience the world in a similar way. Thus, the concepts we use in our everyday life are grounded in sensory perception and bodily action. These processes are referred to as embodied cognition.
Rating the lexicon
In the last years, a lot of data has been gathered using scales that measure sensory and motor associations. To this end, participants are asked to rate on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 5 (greatly) to what extent they perceive e.g. mountain by touching. The same question is asked for all bodily senses. Motor associations are queried by asking: to what degree do you perceive ‘mountain’ by performing an action with the hand (and other body parts). Lynott et al. 2020 collected ratings for almost 40000 English words which is a large portion of the English lexicon. It has become fairly easy to collect this sort of data using online surveys. The quality of the data is quite high because the task is standardised, so that all participants answer the questions under the same conditions.
Emotion associations hint at cultural differences
In our study, we used the same method to query emotion associations in addition to sensory perception and bodily actions. In the figure below you can see the rating screen for emotions.
Just as sensorimotor associations, emotion is believed to play an important role in how we process conceptual information. For example, the concept tree for us is probably a compound of an object we are happy about because we like to be outdoors and that we like to touch its bark with our hands, occasionally climb on it, using our whole body, while we can only perceive it in its entirety from some distance, using our vision. Together, these aspects shape the meaning of tree. In our data, ratings for emotion associations across languages diverged more than the other dimensions. This suggests that emotions are especially prone to cultural differences.
English speakers feel less happy about rain
While most participants in our study rated landscape terms quite similarly, they disagreed significantly about some. Especially when they rated whether they felt rather happy or unhappy, we found some telling differences (see Figure below). For example, English speakers rated the term rain which is indicated in the figure with number 38 less positive than German speakers rated Regen and French speakers pluie (both also 38).
We cannot draw any conclusions about participants’ reasons for their ratings because we didn’t ask. However, English speakers from the UK indicating that they feel rather unhappy about rain seems to be a very plausible result. We are inclined to believe that it rains more often in the UK, hence there is more reason to hate rain – or simply that it is a British cultural habit to be unhappy about rain.
References
Lynott, D., Connell, L., Brysbaert, M., Brand, J., & Carney, J. (2020). The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: Multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 52(3), 1271–1291.
Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. University of Illinois press.
Striedl, P., Majid, A., & Purves, R. S. (2024). Sensory, motor, and emotion associations for landscape concepts differ across neighbouring speech communities. Landscape Research, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2024.2334055