Conference Paper Published

Abstract

This study examined how sensory modalities and affective dimensions jointly shape the semantics of Mandarin monosyllabic adjectives—a lexical class that is both perceptually rich and emotionally salient yet understudied in prior research. Drawing on embodied cognition theory, we integrated newly collected perceptual strength ratings (visual, auditory, haptic, gustatory, olfactory) for 165 adjectives with existing sensory norms (Chen et al., 2019) and affective ratings (valence, arousal; Peng et al., 2024), yielding a dataset of 298 items. Analyses revealed an asymmetrical sensory organization, with strong gustatory–olfactory coupling and relative independence of auditory imagery. Visual strength predicted more positive valence, whereas auditory and haptic strength predicted higher arousal, and modality exclusivity differentiated pleasantness from arousal. These results indicate that sensory experience systematically contributes to affective semantics, supporting embodied accounts of conceptual meaning. The study provides cross-linguistic insights into the perceptual grounding of emotion and offers a resource for future psycholinguistic and computational modeling.