There’s more to “sparkle” than meets the eye: Knowledge of vision and light verbs among sighted and congenitally blind individuals.

We examined the contribution of first-person sensory experience to concepts by studying the meanings of “visual” verbs in congenitally blind adults. Congenitally blind individuals (n=25) and aged-matched sighted controls (n=22) judged the semantic similarity for pairs of verbs (n=2041) referring to events of visual perception (e.g. "to peek”) and light emission (e.g. "to shimmer"). As control conditions, we included verbs of touch perception (“to feel”) and amodal knowledge acquisition (“to perceive”) as well as sound emission ("to boom") and manner of motion (“to roll”). The judgments of blind and sighted subjects for "visual" verbs were remarkably similar. Blind and sighted individuals alike differentiate “visual” verbs from verbs of touch, sound and amodal verbs. Among visual perception verbs, both groups differentiate between intense and continuous versus brief acts of visual perception (e.g. peek vs. stare) and differentiated light emission verbs according to dimensions of intensity (blaze vs. glow) and stability (blaze vs. flash). Interestingly, relative to the sighted, blind speakers on average had more consistent knowledge of touch perception and sound emission verbs. The results demonstrate that first-person sensory experience is not required for typical meaning acquisition, but communicative needs affect the likelihood that a given speaker knows the details of a particular word’s meaning.

本研究旨在探讨第一人称感官体验对概念形成的贡献，通过分析先天失明成人中“视觉”动词的含义展开研究。在25名先天失明者和22名年龄匹配的视力正常对照者中，我们对2041对动词（涉及视觉感知事件，如“窥视”和光发射，如“闪烁”）的语义相似性进行了判断。作为对照条件，我们还纳入了触觉感知动词（“触摸”）、无模态知识获取动词（“感知”）、声音发射动词（“轰鸣”）和运动方式动词（“滚动”）。失明者和视力正常者在“视觉”动词的判断上表现出惊人的相似性。无论是失明者还是视力正常者，都能将“视觉”动词与其他触觉、声音和无模态动词区分开来。在视觉感知动词中，两组都区分了强烈的连续视觉感知动作与短暂的视觉感知动作（如窥视与凝视）以及根据强度（燃烧与闪烁）和稳定性（燃烧与闪光）维度区分的光发射动词。有趣的是，与视力正常者相比，失明者在触摸感知和声音发射动词的知识上平均具有更高的一致性。研究结果表明，第一人称感官体验并非典型意义获取的必要条件，但交流需求会影响特定说话者了解特定词汇含义细节的可能性。