33.3604, Review: Cognitive Science: Dubois, Cance, Coler, Paté (2021)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3604. Fri Nov 18 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3604, Review: Cognitive Science: Dubois, Cance, Coler, Paté (2021)

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Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2022 21:44:15
From: Zorana Perić [zorana.peric.pl at gmail.com]
Subject: Sensory Experiences

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-592.html

AUTHOR: Danièle  Dubois
AUTHOR: Caroline  Cance
AUTHOR: Matt  Coler
AUTHOR: Arthur  Paté
TITLE: Sensory Experiences
SUBTITLE: Exploring meaning and the senses
SERIES TITLE: Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 24
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Zorana Perić, University of Warsaw

SUMMARY 

“Sensory Experiences: Exploring meaning and the senses”, by Danièle Dubois,
Caroline Cance, Matt Coler, Arthur Paté, and Catherine Guastavino, is a
15-chapter publication investigating human sensory experience of five senses
from the multidisciplinary and multilingual perspective placed beyond the
orthodox cognitivism approach. This book is a result of almost 40 years of
international academic collaboration grounded and established on the authors’
own empirical experiences. Sensory Experiences is divided into two parts,
which makes the overall view on the topic more sensible and consistent. The
first part, consisting of a Foreword and nine chapters, introduces the reader
to the cognitive science theoretical framework of perception and points out
its empirical limitations in describing sensory experiences. The second part,
divided into six chapters and an Afterword, provides a revolutionary
methodology and operational instructions, defined by the authors themselves as
“methodological consequences of the Part I”. The authors’ main aim in this
chapter is to reevaluate traditional methods and modify them in order to
describe sensory experiences from a psychological perspective. 

The first chapter, “The five senses and the cognitivist approach to
perception”, provides a theoretical overview of the five senses from the
perspective of various empirical domains: philosophy, psychology, technology,
digital (computer) science, sensory science, and linguistics. The authors
question the validity of traditional definitions and the division of senses
into only five: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch: Are five senses
enough to cover all our perceptions of the world that surrounds us? Discussing
the relationship between language and thought, the authors emphasize that new
linguistic paradigms are still not capable of explaining what kind of
knowledge impacts the word semantics. 

In Chapter 2, “Visual experience of the road for safe driving”, Dubois firstly
illustrates the research beginnings of her group’s studies on sensory
experiences, which dates back to the 1980s. The LCPE research group was
assembled in order to answer concerns of the French Ministry of Transportation
and Safety related to traffic safety. The main idea was to develop cognitive
visual suggestions that would be more explicit, clear, and attention-getting
for drivers – the researchers had to come up with a solution that would
provide drivers with a quickly interpretable sign in order to trigger a fast
and efficient reaction. They conducted several experiments which showed
theoretical and methodological results. The researchers came to the conclusion
that cognitive categorization is determined by one’s gained experience and
knowledge of the world around us. These experiments influenced researchers to
step away from the traditional cognitivism approach and to embrace a more
situated cognition perspective recognizing categories such as “acts of
meaning”. 

Caroline Cance’s Chapter 3, “Experiencing and talking about colors”, explores
colors from the aspect of color naming and color categories. She reviews the
traditional scientific (psychophysical) categorization of colors as universal
primitives and prioritizes the psychological as well as situated approach in
describing the color experience. Color is conceptualized not only by the
individual experience of senses, but also by different types of collective
knowledge: historical, social, cultural, and linguistic. Conceptualization,
categorization and naming of colors is a complex process that cannot be
reduced exclusively to pure physical description or information about the
material world. In three case studies presented in this chapter, readers can
become acquainted with the results of linguistic analyses of color experience
and naming strategies in French and Palikur. 

Chapter 4, “Exploring soundscapes”, by Catherine Guastavino, is dedicated to
sound explorations from the psychological perspective and situated cognition
approach. Outlining the research background on environmental sounds,
Guastavino highlights the fact that these types of sounds have only recently
been acknowledged as sensory experiences and explored as non-acoustical
factors. She gives the main points of their studies on isolated and
environmental sounds categorization. They compare observations taken from
different procedures in soundscape investigations with diverse linguistic
constructions and interpretations of free sound descriptions. A strong
emphasis is put on the necessity to investigate soundscape from the
perspective of different paradigms – where the first and the most significant
place should be given to psychology and the situated cognition approach. 

In Chapter 5, “Exploring speech experiences”, Coler shares his sensory
experience with the linguistic description of the unwritten Aymara language
spoken in the Peruvian Andes. In order to perform this project, the author had
to combine theoretical, scientific, and linguistic knowledge with his
individual experience during fieldwork in Peru. What makes this chapter one of
the most interesting and easiest to read are the researcher's autobiographical
narratives integrated with research observations and facts. During his
research, Coler switched from a closed, translation-based questionnaire
delivering low-quality, insufficient data, to open and more
participant-involving questions which provided him with high-quality data.
Participants were asked to describe everyday, real life situations and
practices: how to prepare a meal, celebrate a holiday, etc. Coler manages to
show that speech can be transcribed in various ways depending on the
linguistic system and levels of its analysis. 

Chapter 6, “Exploring and talking about music”, similarly to the previous
chapter, reveals the authors’ own personal approach and musical sensory
experience. For their case study, Arthur Paté and Pascal Gaillard chose
professional electric guitar players who took part in different research
tasks. The results of the first task, which consisted of listening only,
showed incomplete, restricted past musical experience of guitar players – but
this was task failure, not that of the guitar players. For players to fully
experience music, they still need to experience other aspects like touch,
feel, and play. The main linguistic aim of their study was to determine
lexical units and concepts common and relevant among electric guitar players
in describing or verbalizing their sensory experience of music and musical
instruments. In this study researches highlight the importance of contextual
music analysis – music without context is: “only a study of potentially
meaningless sounds”. 

The sense of smell is Dubois’s research topic in Chapter 7. Unlike other
senses, olfaction has been scientifically neglected for a long time, not to
mention that it was considered a “speechless sense” due to deficient lexical
tools for describing smell or scent. The case studies presented in the “Smell”
chapter analyze olfactory sensory experiences in urban areas as well as
olfactory language material from French literary texts, namely novels. The
semantic analysis and its results showed not so “deficient” lexical data for
odor description. The author emphasizes the need to perform textual, discourse
analysis in order to collect linguistic olfactory data – relying solely on
lexical forms will not provide the researcher with satisfactory results. 

Dubois’s and Cance’s Chapter 8 focuses on the sense of smell and the
linguistic resources used to communicate gustatory experience. In their case
studies based on tasting jams, champagne, and dark bread, they outline how
complex the gustatory sense is and in what ways experience gained by taste can
be verbally described and characterized. Apart from taste, they also analyzed
the visual, olfactory and even auditory impressions collected through their
experiments, as well as mutual relations and influences between them. The wine
investigations showed that experts use more specialized vocabulary in
describing taste, while amateurs verbalize their gustatory perception with
more common, simpler linguistic resources. Once again, the research emphasis
is put on the fact that a multidisciplinary approach must be involved in these
kinds of explorations, with the aim of creating a  comprehensive sensory
experience picture. 

In Chapter 9, “From perception to sensory experiences”, the authors provide a
summary of the analysis and results presented in previous chapters. As the
researchers affirm, sensory experiences should be investigated from the
psychological perspective as a more comprehensive paradigm. Moreover, they
underline the holistic, situated approach, since our sensory cognition is
shaped not just by stimulations, but also by contextual fragments of the
experiences saved in human memory: place, time, people, sounds, smells, etc.
In addition, sensory experiences should be observed through an
interdisciplinary approach: different types of knowledge, paradigms, and
methods should be integrated, different kinds of discourses and contexts
should be analyzed with the  purpose of overall exploration of sensory
experiences. Sensory categories are considered as acts of meaning and thus
cannot be minimalized to pure processing of physical stimulation information. 

Part II of the book is opened by Chapter 10, “Questioning sensory
experiences”, which presents a recapitulation of the characteristics of
sensory experience and explorations of the natural and social sciences, and
also provides concrete action in shifting those explorations to psychological
and linguistic paradigms. 

Chapter 11, “Subject or participants?”, is concerned with specifying
researchers’ human-centered approach to sensory investigations as a
consequence of considering them not just as “subjects” of information
processing, but as active, contributing, and involved participants. They
introduce the reader to participants who took part in their experiments,
explaining how and on what principles they made the participant selection.
Their experimental premise was not to distinguish participants by sex, age,
gender etc. They propose an innovative approach – focus on the facts that are
important for the participants, not for the researcher. 

In the first part of Chapter 12, the authors present an overview of stimuli in
psychology through the historical aspect, thereby highlighting that it is
crucial to determine what is relevant for participants – exploring sensory
experiences from the natural or technological sciences perspective is not
satisfactory in describing the world. The second part of this chapter is
dedicated to constructing the stimuli set by defining proper sensory
categories, isolating stimuli from those situations known to participants in
their everyday life, and selecting relevant stimuli founded on previous
knowledge. 

Chapter 13, “Procedures and outcomes”, addresses the topic of different tasks
that researchers recommend as useful and productive in investigating and
objectivizing sensory experience. This type of research requires a different
experimental approach than traditional (social science) methods. Special
emphasis is given to semantic scales and semantic differentials as the most
commonly used methods in identifying the psychological domain of sensory
stimulation. 

Chapter 14, related to the previous chapter, aims to show how researchers
coped with finding the proper methodology for psychological data analysis by
going beyond the unproductive opposition between the natural and social
sciences and between quantitative and qualitative methods, instead building an
integrated approach with a generic theoretical scheme. The researchers promote
semantic analysis of verbal data through lexical and discourse exploration –
sensory experience cannot be investigated by only analyzing isolated word
meaning. 

The last chapter, “Free sorting task for exploring sensory categories”,
presents a procedure which the authors claim to be very productive in sensory
experience investigations. FST lets participants act freely during
examinations and express the data that is relevant and meaningful to them –
this allows researchers to gather criteria according to which participants
categorize information about sensory experience. This procedure is crucial in
identifying what is important for the participants and to what level.  

EVALUATION 

This collection presents an extraordinary effort to propose a new, integrated,
and revolutionary perspective on the five senses from the aspects of
psychology and linguistics. The significance of “Sensory Experiences” is
undeniable for the further explorations of sensory domains, their linguistic
verbalizations, and the psychological processes involved.  

The researchers built an interdisciplinary guide on how to take advantage of
multiple scientific disciplines and different approaches, and how to adjust
existing standard investigation tools in order to collect more human-oriented
results. They embrace and promote the situated cognitive approach, departing
from the mainstream cognitivist approach.  

>From this reviewer’s perspective and academic interests, the research has one
downside - it does not include touch as one of the senses, leaving this
sensory aspect unexplored. If one is however to trust the authors, this sense
will be the subject of the future investigations. All in all, I found this
publication to be a beacon providing direction for implementing different
approaches into one-discipline research. 

Of course, one cannot expect definitive answers or solutions to all the issues
mentioned, but the book offers a coherent, inspiring, and challenging
perspective on sensory experiences and the way humans describe, verbalize, and
categorize them. 
This publication will certainly be of interest to researchers who are
scientifically engaged with sensory domains from different disciplines, and
will also motivate and interest others to perceive the senses from other
aspects.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Zorana Perić is a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Warsaw. She
is currently preparing a dissertation on tactile perception verbs in Polish
and Serbian language. Her main interests include cognitive linguistics,
sensory linguistics, lexical semantics, perception, metaphor.





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