Ewelina Wnuk

University of Warsaw

From Darwin through Wittgenstein to contemporary scientific investigations, it has been argued humans tend to view facial expressions through a mentalistic lens. According to this view, when looking at someone’s expressive face, we see emotion and are unable to describe the face in behavioral terms, i.e., name the details of facial movements. At th...

The evolution of basic color terms in language is claimed to be stimulated by technological development, involving technological control of color or exposure to artificially colored objects. Accordingly, technologically “simple” non-industrialized societies are expected to have poor lexicalization of color, i.e., only rudimentary lexica of 2, 3 or...

Humans share sensory systems with a common anatomical blueprint, but individual sensory experience nevertheless varies. In olfaction, it is not known to what degree sensory perception, particularly the perception of odor pleasantness, is founded on universal principles,1, 2, 3, 4, 5 dictated by culture,6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 or merely a matter...

Animals across phyla can detect early cues of infection in conspecifics, thereby reducing the risk of contamination. It is unknown, however, if humans can detect cues of sickness in people belonging to communities with whom they have limited or no experience. To test this, we presented Western faces photographed 2 h after the experimental induction...

Olfaction has recently been highlighted as a sense poorly connected with language. Odor is difficult to verbalize, and it has few qualities that afford mimicry by vision or sound. At the same time, emotion is thought to be the most salient dimension of an odor, and it could therefore be an olfactory dimension more easily communicated. We investigat...

Spatial metaphors of affect display remarkable consistencies across languages in mapping sensorimotor experiences onto emotional states, reflecting a great degree of similarity in how our bodies register affect. At the same time, however, affect is complex and there is more than a single possible mapping from vertical spatial concepts to affective...

Human sensory experience varies across the globe. Nonetheless, all humans share sensory systems with a common anatomical blueprint. In olfaction, it is unknown to what degree sensory perception, in particular the perception of odor pleasantness, is dictated by universal biological principles versus sculpted by culture. To address this issue, we ask...

The packaging of meaning in verbs varies widely across languages since verbs are free to encode different aspects of an event. At the same time, languages tend to display recurrent preferences in lexicalization, e.g. verb-framing vs. satellite-framing in motion. It has been noted, however, that the lexicalization patterns in motion are not carried...

Large lexica of basic smell terms are considered to be restricted to a handful of small languages of non-industrialized societies. Accordingly, they are thought to belong to the sphere of rara within lexical typology (Plank 2001. Das grammatische Raritätenkabinett . Konstanz: University of Konstanz. https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/intro/index.php...

It is often assumed odors are associated with hot and cold temperature, since odor processing may trigger thermal sensations, such as coolness in the case of mint. It is unknown, however, whether people make consistent temperature associations for a variety of everyday odors, and, if so, what determines them. Previous work investigating the bases o...

Traditional psycholinguistic studies take place in controlled experimental labs and typically involve testing undergraduate psychology or linguistics students. Investigating psycholinguistics in this manner calls into question the external validity of findings, that is, the extent to which research findings generalize across languages and cultures,...

People appear to have systematic associations between odors and colors. Previous research has emphasized the perceptual nature of these associations, but little attention has been paid to what role language might play. It is possible odor–color associations arise through a process of labeling; that is, participants select a descriptor for an odor a...

Previous research on basic-level object categories shows there is cross-cultural variation in basic-level concepts, arguing against the idea that the basic level reflects an objective reality. In this paper, I extend the investigation to the domain of events. More specifically, I present a case study of verbs of ingestion in Maniq illustrating a hi...

Maniq, spoken by 250–300 people in southern Thailand, is an undocumented geographical outlier of the Aslian branch of Austroasiatic. Isolated from other Aslian varieties and exposed only to Southern Thai, this northernmost member of the group has long experienced a contact situation which is unique in the Aslian context. Aslian is otherwise mostly...

This chapter provides a typological profile of Northern Aslian, a subbranch of the Aslian branch of Austroasiatic comprising a number of closely related language varieties spoken in southern Thailand and northern Peninsular Malaysia. It builds on the authors' ongoing field research, as well as available sources. The profile is based on data from mo...

According to a widely-held view among various scholars, olfaction is inferior to other human senses. It is also believed by many that languages do not have words for describing smells. Data collected among the Maniq, a small population of nomadic foragers in southern Thailand, challenge the above claims and point to a great linguistic and cultural...