Culture- and Language-specific Grounding: A Comparison of Perceptuo-Conceptual Links Between Emotion, Colour, Space, and Brightness in English versus Mandarin

Language is one of the most powerful tools humans use to interact with their surroundings. Language is used to influence and control the actions of interaction partners, and the emotional and affective responses that language elicits in people – intentionally or unintentionally – are probably the most important demonstration of this impact of language.
More and more evidence suggests a link between affective language and perceptual information (position, brightness, colour of stimuli), which has led researchers to hypothesize that perceptual and motor processes are the foundation of human emotions. These findings appear to be universal – but are they? How similar are the links between perception and conception really, across different languages and cultures? In an ever more mobile and interconnected world, this is a highly important question. It is possible that associations between emotions and perception/action are language- and culture-dependent, rather than universally shaped. This is the current proposal’s central hypothesis which I seek to investigate with methods from experimental psychology and psycholinguistics. I am first going to summarize the current state of the research on evidence for culture- or language-specificity of the link between emotions and perception/action before turning to specify my research questions and how I plan to address them.